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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 





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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 

Chapk../... Copyright No. 



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UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



3 31 '899 



AMERICAN NOTES 



American Notes 



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RUDYARD KIPLING 

With Introduction 



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BOSTON 
BROWN AND COMPANY 

378 BoYLSTON Street 
1899 



Copyright, 1899, 
By Brown and Company. 



TWOOOFmS tt»;CElVED. 








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Mnibersits Press : 
John Wilson and Son, Cambridge, U.S.A. 






I 



Introduction 

N an issue of the London World in April, 1890, 
there appeared the following paragraph : "Two 
small rooms connected by a tiny hall afford suf- 
ficient space to contain Mr. Rudyard Kipling, the 
literary hero of the present hour, ' the man who 
came from nowhere,' as he says himself, and who 
a year ago was consciously nothing in the literary 

world." 

Six months previous to this Mr. Kipling, then 
but twenty-four years old, had arrived in England 
from India to find that fame had preceded him. 
He had already gained fame in India, where scores 
of cultured and critical people, after reading " De- 
partmental Ditties," " Plain Tales from the Hills," 
and various other stories and verses, had stamped 
him for a genius. 

Fortunately for everybody who reads, London 
interested and stimulated ' Mr. Kipling, and he 
settled down to writing. " The Record of Ba- 
dalia Herodsfoot," and his first novel, " The Light 



6 Introduction 

that Failed," appeared in 1890 and 1891 ; then a 
collection of verse, " Life's Handicap, being stories 
of Mine Own People," was published simultane- 
ously in London and New York City; then fol- 
lowed more verse, and so on through an unending 
series. 

In 1 89 1 Mr. Kipling met the young author 
Wolcott Balestier, at that time connected with a 
London publishing house. A strong attachment 
grew between the two, and several months after 
their first meeting they came to Mr. Balestier's 
Vermont home, where they collaborated on " The 
Naulahka : A Story of West and East," for which 
The Century paid the largest price ever given by 
an American magazine for a story. The follow- 
ing year Mr. Kipling married Mr. Balestier's 
sister in London and brought her to America. 

The Balestiers were of an aristocratic New 
York family ; the grandfather of Mrs. Kipling 
was J. M. Balestier, a prominent lawyer in New 
York City and Chicago, who died in 1888, leaving 
a fortune of about a million. Her maternal grand- 
father was E. Peshine Smith of Rochester, N. Y., 
a noted author and jurist, who was selected in 
187 1 by Secretary Hamilton Fish to go to Japan 
as the Mikado's adviser in international law. The 



Introduction 7 

ancestral home of the Balestiers was near Brattle- 
boro% Vt., and here Mr. Kipling brought his bride. 
The young Englishman was so impressed by the 
Vermont scenery that he rented for a time the 
cottage on the " Bliss Farm," in which Steele 
Mackaye the playwright wrote the well known 
drama "Hazel Kirke." 

The next spring Mr. Kipling purchased from 
his brother-in-law, Beatty Balestier, a tract of land 
about three miles north of Brattleboro', Vt., and on 
this erected a house at a cost of nearly ^50,000, 
which he named " The Naulahka.'' This was his 
home during his sojourn in America. Here he 
wrote when in the mood, and for recreation 
tramped abroad over the hills. His social duties 
at this period were not arduous, for to his home he 
refused admittance to all but tried friends. He 
made a study of the Yankee country dialect and 
character for "The Walking Delegate," and while 
" Captains Courageous," the story of New Eng- 
land fisher life, was before him he spent some time 
among the Gloucester fishermen with an acquaint- 
ance who had access to the household gods of 
these people. 

He returned to England in August, 1896, and 
did not visit America again till 1899, when he 



8 Introduction 

came with his wife and three children for a limited 
time. 

It is hardly fair to Mr. Kipling to call " Ameri- 
can Notes " first impressions, for one reading them 
will readily see that the impressions are superficial, 
little thought being put upon the writing. They 
seem supersarcastic, and would lead one to believe 
that Mr. Kipling is antagonistic to America in 
every respect. This, however, is not true. These 
" Notes " aroused much protest and severe criti- 
cism when they appeared in 1891, and are consid- 
ered so far beneath Mr. Kipling's real work that 
they have been nearly suppressed and are rarely 
found in a list of his writings. Their very caus- 
tic style is of interest to a student and lover of 
Kipling, and for this reason the publishers believe 
them worthy of a good binding. 

G. P. T. 



Contents 



Page 

At the Golden Gate 1 1 

American Politics 35 

American Salmon 57 

The Yellowstone 74 

Chicago 91 

The American Army 109 

America's Defenceless Coasts 1 19 



At the Golden Gate 

" Serene, indifferent to fate, 
Thou sittest at the Western Gate; 
Thou seest the white seas fold their tents. 
Oh, warder of two continents; 
Thou drawest all things, small and great. 
To thee, beside the Western Gate/' 

HIS Is what Bret Harte has written of the 
great city of San Francisco, and for the 
past fortnight I have been wondering what made 

him do it. 

There is neither serenity nor indifference to be 
found In these parts ; and evil would It be for the 
continents whose wardship were Intrusted to so 
reckless a guardian. 

Behold me pitched neck-and-crop from twenty 
days of the high seas Into the whirl of California, 
deprived of any guidance, and left to draw my 
own conclusions. Protect me from the wrath 
of an outraged community if these letters be ever 



T 



12 American Notes 

read by American eyes ! San Francisco is a mad 
city — inhabited for the most part by perfectly 
insane people, whose women are of a remarkable 
beauty. 

When the " City of Pekin " steamed through 
the Golden Gate, I saw with great joy that the 
block-house which guarded the mouth of the 
" finest harbor in the world, sir," could be silenced 
by two gunboats from Hong Kong with safety, 
comfort, and despatch. Also, there was not a 
single American vessel of war in the harbor. 

This may sound bloodthirsty ; but remember, I 
had come with a grievance upon me — the griev- 
ance of the pirated English books. 

Then a reporter leaped aboard, and ere I could 
gasp held me in his toils. He pumped me ex- 
haustively while I was getting ashore, demanding 
of all things in the world news about Indian 
journalism. It is an awful thing to enter a new 
land with a new lie on your lips. I spoke the 
truth to the evil-minded Custom House man who 
turned my most sacred raiment on a floor com- 
posed of stable refuse and pine splinters j but the 
reporter overwhelmed me not so much by his 
poignant audacity as his beautiful ignorance. I 
am sorry now that I did not tell him more lies as 



At the Golden Gate 1 3 

I passed into a city of three hundred thousand 
white men. Think of it ! Three hundred thou- 
sand white men and women gathered in one spot, 
walking upon real pavements in front of plate- 
glass-windowed shops, and talking something that 
at first hearing was not very different from Eng- 
Hsh. It was only when I had tangled myself up 
in a hopeless maze of small wooden houses, dust, 
street refuse, and children who played with empty 
kerosene tins, that I discovered the difference of 
speech. 

" You want to go to the Palace Hotel ? " said 
an affable youth on a dray. "What in hell are 
you doing here, then ? This is about the lowest 
ward in the city. Go six blocks north to corner 
of Geary and Markey, then walk around till you 
strike corner of Gutter and Sixteenth, and that 
brings you there." 

I do not vouch for the literal accuracy of these 
directions, quoting but from a disordered memory. 

"Amen," I said. "But who am I that I 
should strike the corners of such as you name ? 
Peradventure they be gentlemen of repute, and 
might hit. back. Bring it down to dots, my son." 

I thought he would have smitten me, but he 
did n't. He explained that no one ever used the 



14 American Notes 

word " street," and that every one was supposed to 
know how the streets ran, for sometimes the names 
were upon the lamps and sometimes they were n't. 
Fortified with these directions, I proceeded till I 
found a mighty street, full of sumptuous buildings 
four and five stories high, but paved with rude 
cobblestones, after the fashion of the year i. 

Here a tram-car, without any visible means of 
support, slid stealthily behind me and nearly struck 
me in the back. This was the famous cable car 
of San Francisco, which runs by gripping an endless 
wire rope sunk in the ground, and of which I will 
tell you more anon. A hundred yards further 
there was a slight commotion in the street, a gath- 
ering together of three or four, something that 
glittered as it moved very swiftly. A ponderous 
Irish gentleman, with priest's cords in his hat and 
a small nickel-plated badge on his fat bosom, 
emerged from the knot supporting a Chinaman 
who had been stabbed in the eye and was bleeding 
like a pig. The by-standers went their ways, and 
the Chinaman, assisted by the policeman, his own. 
Of course this was none of my business, but I 
rather wanted to know what had happened to the 
gentleman who had dealt the stab. It said a great 
deal for the excellence of the municipal arrange- 



At the Golden Gate 1 5 

ment of the town that a surging crowd did not at 
once block the street to see what was going for- 
ward. I was the sixth man and the last who 
assisted at the performance, and my curiosity was 
six times the greatest. Indeed, I felt ashamed of 
showing it. 

There were no more incidents till I reached the 
Palace Hotel, a seven-storied warren of humanity 
with a thousand rooms in it. All the travel books 
will tell you about hotel arrangements in this 
country. They should be seen to be appreciated. 
Understand clearly — and this letter is written 
after a thousand miles of experiences — that 
money will not buy you service in the West. 
When the hotel clerk — the man who awards your 
room to you and who is supposed to give you infor- 
mation — when that resplendent individual stoops to 
attend to your wants he does so whistling or hum- 
ming or picking his teeth, or pauses to converse 
with some one he knows. These performances, I 
gather, are to impress upon you that he is a free 
man and your equal. From his general appearance 
and the size of his diamonds he ought to be your 
superior. There is no necessity for this swagger- 
ing self-consciousness of freedom. Business is 
business, and the man who is paid to attend to a 



1 6 American Notes 

man might reasonably devote his whole attention 
to the job. Out of office hours he can take his 
coach and four and pervade society if he pleases. 

In a vast marble-paved hall, under the glare of 
an electric light, sat forty or fifty men, and for 
their use and amusement were provided spittoons 
of infinite capacity and generous gape. Most of 
the men wore frock-coats and top-hats — the 
things that we in India put on at a wedding-break- 
fast, if we possess them — but they all spat. They 
spat on principle. The spittoons were on the 
staircases, in each bedroom — yea, and in chambers 
even more sacred than these. They chased one 
into retirement, but they blossomed in chiefest 
splendor round the bar, and they were all used, 
every reeking one of them. 

Just before I began to feel deathly sick another 
reporter grappled me. What he wanted to know 
was the precise area of India in square miles. I 
referred him to Whittaker. He had never heard 
of Whittaker. He wanted it from my own 
mouth, and I would not tell him. Then he 
swerved ofF, just like the other man, to details of 
journalism in our own country. I ventured to 
suggest that the interior economy of a paper most 
concerned the people who worked it. 



At the Golden Gate 17 

" That 's the very thing that interests us," he 
said. " Have you got reporters anything like our 
reporters on Indian newspapers ? " 

" We have not," I said, and suppressed the 
" thank God " rising to my lips. 

" Why have n't you ? " said he. 

" Because they would die," I said. 

It was exactly like talking to a child — a very 
rude little child. He would begin almost every 
sentence with, " Now tell me something about 
India," and would turn aimlessly from one ques- 
tion to the other without the least continuity. I 
was not angry, but keenly interested. The man 
was a revelation to me. To his questions I re- 
turned answers mendacious and evasive. After 
all, it really did not matter what I said. He 
could not understand. I can only hope and pray 
that none of the readers of the " Pioneer " will 
ever see that portentous interview. The man 
made me out to be an idiot several sizes more 
drivelling than my destiny intended, and the rank- 
ness of his ignorance managed to distort the few 
poor facts with which I supplied him into large 
and elaborate lies. 7^hen, thought I, " the matter 
of American journalism shall be looked into later 
on. At present I will enjoy myself." 



1 8 American Notes 

No man rose to tell me what were the lions of 
the place. No one volunteered any sort of con- 
veyance. I was absolutely alone in this big city 
of white folk. By instinct I sought refreshment, 
and came upon a bar-room full of bad Salon 
pictures in which men with hats on the backs of 
their heads were wolfing food from a counter. 
It was the institution of the " free lunch " I had 
struck. You paid for a drink and got as much 
as you wanted to eat. For something less than 
a rupee a day a man can feed himself sumptuously 
in San Francisco, even though he be a bankrupt. 
Remember this if ever you are stranded in these 
parts. 

Later I began a vast but unsystematic explora- 
tion of the streets. I asked for no names. It 
was enough that the pavements were full of white 
men and women, the streets clanging with traffic, 
and that the restful roar of a great city rang in 
my ears. The cable cars glided to all points of 
the compass at once. I took them one by one 
till I could go no further. San Francisco has 
been pitched down on the sand bunkers of the 
Bikaneer desert. About one fourth of it is 
ground reclaimed from the sea — any old-timers 
will tell you all about that. The remainder is 



At the Golden Gate 19 

just ragged, unthrifty sand hills, to-day pegged 
down by houses. 

From an English point of view there has not 
been the least attempt at grading those hills, and 
indeed you might as well try to grade the hillocks 
of Sind. The cable cars have for all practical 
purposes made San Francisco a dead level. They 
take no count of rise or fall, but slide equably on 
their appointed courses from one end to the other 
of a six-mile street. They turn corners almost 
at right angles, cross other lines, and for aught I 
know may run up the sides of houses. There 
is no visible agency of their flight, but once in 
awhile you shall pass a five-storied building hum- 
ming with machinery that winds up an everlasting 
wire cable, and the initiated will tell you that here 
is the mechanism. I gave up asking questions. 
If it pleases Providence to make a car run up and 
down a slit in the ground for many miles, and if 
for twopence halfpenny I can ride in that car, 
why shall I seek the reasons of the miracle? 
Rather let me look out of the windows till the 
shops give place to thousands and thousands of 
little houses made of wood (to imitate stone), each 
house just big enough for a man and his family. 
Let me watch the people in the cars and try to 



20 American Notes 

find out in what manner they differ from us, their 
ancestors. 

It grieves me now that I cursed them (in the 
matter of book piracy), because I perceived that 
my curse is working and that their speech is be- 
coming a horror already. They delude them- 
selves Into the belief that they talk English — the 
English — and I have already been pitied for 
speaking with " an English accent." The man 
who pitied me spoke, so far as I was con- 
cerned, the language of thieves. And they all do. 
Where we put the accent forward they throw it 
back, and vice versa; where we give the long 
" a " they use the short, and words so simple as 
to be past mistaking they pronounce somewhere 
up in the dome of their heads. How do these 
things happen ? 

Oliver Wendell Holmes says that the Yankee 
school-marm, the cider and the salt codfish of the 
Eastern States, are responsible for what he calls 
a nasal accent. I know better. They stole 
books from across the water without paying for 
'em, and the snort of delight was fixed In their 
nostrils forever by a just Providence. That is 
why they talk a foreign tongue to-day. 

" Cats is dogs, and rabbits is dogs, and so 's 



At the Golden Gate 21 

parrots. But this 'ere tortoise is an insect, so 
there ain't no charge," as the old porter said. 

A Hindoo is a Hindoo and a brother to the 
man who knows his vernacular. And a French- 
man is French because he speaks his own lan- 
guage. But the American has no language. He 
is dialect, slang, provincialism, accent, and so 
forth. Now that I have heard their voices, all 
the beauty of Bret Harte is being ruined for me, 
because I find myself catching through the roll of 
his rhythmical prose the cadence of his peculiar 
fatherland. Get an American lady to read to you 
" How Santa Claus Came to Simpson's Bar," and 
see how much is, under her tongue, left of the 
beauty of the original. 

But I am sorry for Bret Harte. It happened 
this way. A reporter asked me what I thought 
of the city, and I made answer suavely that it was 
hallowed ground to me, because of Bret Harte. 
That was true. 

" Well," said the reporter, "Bret Harte claims 
California, but California don't claim Bret Harte. 
He 's been so long in England that he 's quite 
English. Have you seen our cracker factories or 
the new offices of the ' Examiner ' ? " 

He could not understand that to the outside 



22 American Notes 

world the city was worth a great deal less than the 
man. I never intended to curse the people with 
a provincialism so vast as this. 

But let us return to our sheep — which means 
the sea-lions of the CliiF House. They are the 
great show of San Francisco. You take a train 
which pulls up the middle of the street (it killed 
two people the day before yesterday, being un- 
braked and driven absolutely regardless of con- 
sequences), and you pull up somewhere at the back 
of the city on the Pacific beach. Originally the 
cliiTs and their approaches must have been pretty, 
but they have been so carefully defiled with ad- 
vertisements that they are now one big blistered 
abomination. A hundred yards from the shore 
stood a big rock covered with the carcasses of the 
sleek sea-beasts, who roared and rolled and wal- 
loped in the spouting surges. No bold man had 
painted the creatures sky-blue or advertised news- 
papers on their backs, wherefore they did not 
match the landscape, which was chiefly hoarding. 
Some day, perhaps, whatever sort of government 
may obtain in this country will make a restoration 
of the place and keep it clean and neat. At 
present the sovereign people, of whom I have 
heard so much already, are vending cherries and 



At the Golden Gate 23 

painting the virtues of " Little Bile Beans " all 
over it. 

Night fell over the Pacific, and the white sea- 
fog whipped through the streets, dimming the 
splendors of the electric lights. It is the use of 
this city, her men and women folk, to parade 
between the hours of eight and ten a certain 
street called Kearney Street, where the finest shops 
are situated. Here the click of high heels on the 
pavement is loudest, here the lights are brightest, 
and here the thunder of the traffic is most over- 
whelming. I watched Young California, and saw 
that it was, at least, expensively dressed, cheerful 
in manner, and self-asserting in conversation. 
Also the women were very fair. Perhaps eight- 
een days aboard ship had something to do with 
my unreserved admiration. The maidens were 
of generous build, large, well groomed, and attired 
in raiment that even to my inexperienced eyes 
must have cost much. Kearney Street at nine 
o'clock levels all distinctions of rank as impartially 
as the grave. Again and again I loitered at the 
heels of a couple of resplendent beings, only to 
overhear, when I expected the level voice of cul- 
ture, the staccato " Sez he," " Sez I " that is the 
mark of the white servant-girl all the world over. 



24 American Notes 

This was depressing because, in spite of all 
that goes to the contrary, fine feathers ought to 
make fine birds. There was wealth — unlimited 
wealth — in the streets, but not an accent that 
would not have been dear at fifty cents. Where- 
fore, revolving in my mind that these folk were 
barbarians, I was presently enlightened and made 
aware that they also were the heirs of all the ages, 
and civilized after all. There appeared before me an 
affable stranger of prepossessing appearance, with a 
blue and an innocent eye. Addressing me by name, 
he claimed to have met me in New York, at the 
Windsor, and to this claim I gave a qualified assent. 
I did not remember the fact, but since he was so 
certain of it, whv',then — I waited developments. 

" And what did you think of Indiana when you 
came through ? " was the next question. 

It revealed the mystery of previous acquaintance 
and one or two other things. With reprehensible 
carelessness my friend of the light-blue eye had 
looked up the name of his victim in the hotel 
register, and read " Indiana " for India. 

The provincialism with which I had cursed his 
people extended to himself. He could not imagine 
an Englishman coming through the States from 
west to east instead of by the regularly ordained 



At the Golden Gate 25 

route. My fear was that in his delight in finding 
me so responsive he would make remarks about 
New York and the Windsor which I could not 
understand. And, indeed, he adventured in this 
direction once or twice, asking me what I thought 
of such and such streets, which from his tone I 
gathered to be anything but respectable. It is 
trying to talk unknown New York in almost un- 
known San Francisco. But my friend was merci- 
ful. He protested that I was one after his own 
heart, and pressed upon me rare and curious drinks 
at more than one bar. These drinks I accepted 
with gratitude, as also the cigars with which his 
pockets were stored. He would show me the life 
of the city. Having no desire to watch a weary 
old play again, I evaded the offer and received in 
lieu of the devil's instruction much coarse flattery. 
Curiously constituted is the soul of man. Know- 
ing how and where this man lied, waiting idly for 
the finale, I was distinctly conscious, as he bubbled 
compliments in my ear, of soft thrills of gratified 
pride stealing from hat-rim to boot-heels. I was 
wise, quoth he — anybody could see that with half 
an eye ; sagacious, versed in the ways of the 
world, an acquaintance to be desired ; one who 
had tasted the cup of life with discretion. 



26 American Notes 

All this pleased me, and in a measure numbed 
the suspicion that was thoroughly aroused. Event- 
ually the blue-eyed one discovered, nay, insisted, 
that I had a taste for cards (this was clumsily 
worked in, but it was my fault, for in that I met 
him half-way and allowed him no chance of good 
acting). Hereupon I laid my head upon one side 
and simulated unholy wisdom, quoting odds and 
ends of poker talk, all ludicrously misapplied. 
My friend kept his countenance admirably, and 
well he might, for five minutes later we arrived, 
always by the purest of chance, at a place where 
we could play cards and also frivol with Louisiana 
State Lottery tickets. Would I play ? 

" Nay," said I, " for to me cards have neither 
meaning nor continuity ; but let us assume that I 
am going to play. How would you and your 
friends get to work ? Would you play a straight 
game, or make me drunk, or — well, the fact is, 
I 'm a newspaper man, and I M be much obliged 
if you 'd let me know something about bunco 
steering.'* 

My blue-eyed friend erected himself into an 
obelisk of profanity. He cursed me by his gods 
— the right and left bower ; he even cursed the 
very good cigars he had given me. But, the 



At the Golden Gate 27 

storm over, he quieted down and explained. I 
apologized for causing him to waste an evening, 
and we spent a very pleasant time together. 

Inaccuracy, provincialism, and a too hasty rush- 
ing to conclusions, were the rocks that he had 
split on, but he got his revenge when he said : — 

" How would I play with you ? From all the 
poppy-cock {Anglice bosh) you talked about poker, 
I 'd ha' played a straight game, and skinned you. 
I would n't have taken the trouble to make you 
drunk. You never knew anything of the game, 
but how I was mistaken In going to work on you, 
makes me sick." 

He glared at me as though I had done him an 
Injury. To-day I know how It Is that year after 
year, week after week, the bunco steerer, who Is 
the confidence trick and the card-sharper man of 
other climes, secures his prey. He clavers them 
over with flattery as the snake clavers the rabbit. 
The incident depressed me because it showed I 
had left the Innocent East far behind and was 
come to a country where a man must look out 
for himself. The very hotels bristled with notices 
about keeping my door locked and depositing my 
valuables in a safe. The white man In a lump Is 
bad. Weeping softly for O-Toyo (little I knew 



28 American Notes 

then that my heart was to be torn afresh from 
my bosom) I fell asleep in the clanging hotel. 

Next morning I had entered upon the deferred 
inheritance. There are no princes in America « — 
at least with crowns on their heads — but a gen- 
erous-minded member of some royal family re- 
ceived my letter of introduction. Ere the day 
closed I was a member of the two clubs, and 
booked for many engagements to dinner and 
party. Now, this prince, upon whose financial 
operations be continual increase, had no reason, 
nor had the others, his friends, to put himself out 
for the sake of one Briton more or less, but he 
rested not till he had accomplished all in my 
behalf that a mother could think of for her debu- 
tante daughter. 

Do you know the Bohemian Club of San 
Francisco ? They say its fame extends over the 
world. It was created, somewhat on the lines of 
the Savage, by men who wrote or drew things, 
and has blossomed into most unrepublican luxury. 
The ruler of the place is an owl — an owl stand- 
ing upon a skull and cross-bones, showing forth 
grimly the wisdom of the man of letters and the 
end of his hopes for immortality. The owl stands 
on the staircase, a statue four feet high ; is carved 



At the Golden Gate 29 

in the wood-work, flutters on the frescoed ceiling, 
is stamped on the note-paper, and hangs on the 
walls. He is an ancient and honorable bird. 
Under his wing 't was my privilege to meet with 
white men whose lives were not chained down to 
routine of toil, who wrote magazine articles in- 
stead of reading them hurriedly in the pauses of 
office-work, who painted pictures instead of con- 
tenting themselves with cheap etchings picked up 
at another man's sale of effects. Mine were all 
the rights of social intercourse, craft by craft, that 
India, stony-hearted step-mother of collectors, has 
swindled us out of. Treading soft carpets and 
breathing the incense of superior cigars, I wan- 
dered from room to room studying the paintings 
in which the members of the club had caricatured 
themselves, their associates, and their aims. 
There was a slick French audacity about the 
workmanship of these men of toil unbending that 
went straight to the heart of the beholder. And 
yet it was not altogether French. A dry grimness 
of treatment, almost Dutch, marked the difference. 
The men painted as they spoke — with certainty. 
The club indulges in revelries which it calls 
" jinks '' — high and low, at intervals — and each 
of these gatherings is faithfully portrayed in oils 



30 American Notes 

by hands that know their business. In this club 
were no amateurs spoiling canvas, because they 
fancied they could handle oils without knowledge 
of shadows or anatomy — no gentleman of leisure 
ruining the temper of publishers and an already 
ruined market with attempts to write, "because 
everybody writes something these days." 

My hosts were working, or had worked for their 
daily bread with pen or paint, and their talk for the 
most part was of the shop — shoppy — that is to 
say, delightful. They extended a large hand of 
welcome, and were as brethren, and I did homage 
to the owl and listened to their talk. An Indian 
club about Christmas-time will yield, if properly 
worked, an abundant harvest of queer tales; but 
at a gathering of Americans from the uttermost 
ends of their own continent, the tales are larger, 
thicker, more spinous, and even more azure than 
any Indian variety. Tales of the war I heard told 
by an ex-officer of the South over his evening 
drink to a colonel of the Northern army, my 
introducer, who had served as a trooper in the 
Northern Horse, throwing in emendations from 
time to time. "Tales of the Law," which in this 
country is an amazingly elastic affair, followed 
from the lips of a judge. Forgive me for re- 



At the Golden Gate 31 

cording one tale that struck me as new. It may 
interest the up-country Bar in India. 

Once upon a time there was Samuelson, a young 
lawyer, who feared not God, neither regarded the 
Bench. (Name, age, and town of the man were 
given at great length.) To him no case had ever 
come as a client, partly because he lived in a dis- 
trict where lynch law prevailed, and partly because 
the most desperate prisoner shrunk from intrusting 
himself to the mercies of a phenomenal stammerer. 
But in time there happened an aggravated murder 
— so bad, indeed, that by common consent the 
citizens decided, as a prelude to lynching, to give 
the real law a chance. They could, in fact, gam- 
bol round that murder. They met — the court in 
its shirt-sleeves — and against the raw square of 
the Court House window a temptingly suggestive 
branch of a tree fretted the sky. No one appeared 
for the prisoner, and, partly in jest, the court ad- 
vised young Samuelson to take up the case. 

"The prisoner is undefended, Sam," said the 
court. " The square thing to do would be for you 
to take him aside and do the best you can for him." 

Court, jury, and witness then adjourned to the 
veranda, while Samuelson led his client aside to 
the Court House cells. An hour passed ere the 



32 American Notes 

lawyer returned alone. Mutely the audience 
questioned, 

" May it p-p-please the c-court," said Samuel- 
son, " my client's case is a b-b-b-bad one — a 
d-d-amn bad one. You told me to do the b-b-best 
I c-could for him, judge, so I Ve jest given him 
y-your b-b-bay gelding, an* told him to light out 
for healthier c-climes, my p-p-professional opinion 
being he'd be hanged quicker 'n h-h-hades if he 
dallied here. B-by this time my client 's 'bout 
fifteen mile out yonder somewheres. That was 
the b-b-best I could do for him, may it p-p-please 
the court." 

The young man, escaping punishment in lieu of 
the prisoner, made his fortune ere five years. 

Other voices followed, with equally wondrous 
tales of riata-throwing in Mexico and Arizona, of 
gambling at army posts in Texas, of newspaper 
wars waged in godless Chicago (I could not help 
being interested, but they were not pretty tricks), 
of deaths sudden and violent in Montana and 
Dakota, of the loves of half-breed maidens in the 
South, and fantastic huntings for gold in mysteri- 
ous Alaska. Above all, they told the story of the 
building of old San Francisco, when the "finest 
collection of humanity on God's earth, sir, started 



At the Golden Gate 33 

this town, and the water came up to the foot of 
Market Street." Very terrible were some of the 
tales, grimly humorous the others, and the men 
in broadcloth and fine linen who told them had 
played their parts in them. 

" And now and again when things got too bad 
they would toll the city bell, and the Vigilance 
Committee turned out and hanged the suspicious 
characters. A man did n't begin to be suspected 
in those days till he had committed at least one 
unprovoked murder," said a calm-eyed, portly old 
gentleman. 

I looked at the pictures around me, the noise- 
less, neat-uniformed waiter behind me, the oak- 
ribbed ceiling above, the velvet carpet beneath. It 
was hard to realize that even twenty years ago 
you could see a man handed with great pomp. 
Later on I found reason to change my opinion. 
The tales gave me a headache and set me think- 
ing. How in the world was it possible to take in 
even one thousandth of this huge, roaring, many- 
sided continent ? In the tobacco-scented silence 
of the sumptuous library lay Professor Bryce's 
book on the American Republic. 

" It is an omen," said I. " He has done all 
things in all seriousness, and he may be purchased 

3 



34 American Notes 

for half a guinea. Those who desire information 
of the most undoubted, must refer to his pages. 
For me is the daily round of vagabondage, the 
recording of the incidents of the hour and inter- 
course v/ith the travelling-companion of the day. 
I will not ' do ' this country at all." 

And I forgot all about India for ten days while 
I went out to dinners and watched the social cus- 
toms of the people, which are entirely different 
from our customs, and was introduced to men of 
many millions. These persons are harmless in 
their earlier stages — that is to say, a man worth 
three or four million dollars may be a good talker, 
clever, amusing, and of the world ; a man with 
twice that amount is to be avoided, and a twenty 
million man is — just twenty milhons. Take an 
instance. I was speaking to a newspaper man 
about seeing the proprietor of his journal, as in 
my innocence I supposed newspaper men occa- 
sionally did. My friend snorted indignantly : — 

" See him ! Great Scott ! No. If he hap- 
pens to appear in the office, I have to associate 
with him ; but, thank Heaven ! outside of that I 
move in circles where he cannot come." 

And yet the first thing I have been taught to 
believe is that money was everything in America ! 



II 

American Politics 



I HAVE been watching machinery in repose 
after reading about machinery in action. 

An excellent gentleman, who bears a name 
honored in the magazine, v/rites, much as Disraeli 
orated, of "the sublime instincts of an ancient 
people," the certainty with which they can be 
trusted to manage their own affairs in their own 
way, and the speed with which they are making 
for all sorts of desirable goals. This he called a 
statement or purview of American politics. 

I went almost directly afterward to a saloon 
where gentlemen interested in ward politics nightly 
congregate. They were not pretty persons. 
Some of them were bloated, and they all swore 
cheerfully till the heavy gold watch-chains on 
their fat stomachs rose and fell again; but they 
talked over their liquor as men who had power and 
unquestioned access to places of trust and profit. 



36 American Notes 

The magazine writer discussed theories of 
government; these men the practice. They had 
been there. They knew all about it. They 
banged their fists on the table and spoke of politi- 
cal " pulls," the vending of votes, and so forth. 
Theirs was not the talk of village babblers recon- 
structing the affairs of the nation, but of strong, 
coarse, lustful men fighting for spoil, and thoroughly 
understanding the best methods of reaching it. 

I listened long and intently to speech I could 
not understand — or but in spots. 

It was the speech of business, however. I had 
sense enough to know that, and to do my laughing 
outside the door. 

Then I began to understand why my pleasant 
and well-educated hosts in San Francisco spoke 
with a bitter scorn of such duties of citizenship as 
voting and taking an interest in the distribution of 
offices. Scores of men have told me, without false 
pride, that they would as soon concern themselves 
with the public affairs of the city or state as rake 
muck with a steam-shovel. It may be that their 
lofty disdain covers selfishness, but I should be 
very sorry habitually to meet the fat gentlemen 
with shiny top-hats and plump cigars in whose 
society I have been spending the evening. 



American Politics 37 

Read about politics as the cultured writer of the 
magazine regards 'em, and then, and not till then, 
pay your respects to the gentlemen who run the 
grimy reality. 

I 'm sick of interviewing night editors who lean 
their chair against the wall, and, in response to 
my demand for the record of a prominent citizen, 
answer : " Well, you see, he began by keeping a 
saloon," etc. I prefer to believe that my inform- 
ants are treating me as In the old sinful days In 
India I was used to treat the wandering globe- 
trotter. They declare that they speak the truth, 
and the news of dog politics lately vouchsafed to 
me in groggerles inclines me to believe, but I 
won't. The people are much too nice to slangan- 
der as recklessly as I have been doing. 

Besides, I am hopelessly in love with about eight 
American maidens — all perfectly delightful till 
the next one comes into the room. 

O-Toyo was a darling, but she lacked several 
things — conversation for one. You cannot live 
on giggles. She shall remain unmarried at 
Nagasaki, while I roast a battered heart before the 
shrine of a big Kentucky blonde, who had for a 
nurse when she was little a negro " mammy." 

By consequence she has welded on California 



38 American Notes 

beauty, Paris dresses, Eastern culture, Europe 
trips, and wild Western originality, the queer, 
dreamy superstitions of the quarters, and the re- 
sult is soul-shattering. And she is but one of 
many stars. 

Item, a maiden who believes in education and 
possesses it, with a few hundred thousand dollars 
to boot and a taste for slumming. 

Item, the leader of a sort of informal salon 
where girls congregate, read papers, and daringly 
discuss metaphysical problems and candy — a sloe- 
eyed, black-browed, imperious maiden she. 

Item, a very small maiden, absolutely without 
reverence, who can in one swift sentence trample 
upon and leave gasping half a dozen young men. 

Item, a millionairess, burdened with her money, 
lonely, caustic, with a tongue keen as a sword, 
yearning for a sphere, but chained up to the rock 
of her vast possessions. 

Item, a typewriter maiden earning her own 
bread in this big city, because she does n't think 
a girl ought to be a burden on her parents, who 
quotes Theophile Gautier and moves through the 
world manfully, much respected for all her twenty 
inexperienced summers. 

Item, a woman from cloud-land who has no 



American Politics 39 

history in the past or future, but is discreetly of 
the present, and strives for the confidences of 
male humanity on the grounds of " sympathy " 
(methinks this is not altogether a new type). 

Item, a girl in a " dive," blessed with a Greek 
head and eyes, that seem to speak all that is best 
and sweetest in the world. But woe is me ! She 
has no ideas in this world or the next beyond the 
consumption of beer (a commission on each 
bottle), and protests that she sings the songs al- 
lotted to her nightly without more than the 
vaguest notion of their meaning. 

Sweet and comely are the maidens of Devon- 
shire ', delicate and of gracious seeming those who 
live in the pleasant places of London ; fascinating 
for all their demureness the damsels of France, 
clinging closely to their mothers, with large eyes 
wondering at the wicked world ; excellent in her 
own place and to those who understand her is the 
Anglo-Indian "spin" in her second season; but 
the girls of America are above and beyond them 
all. They are clever, they can talk — yea, it is 
said that they think. Certainly they have an 
appearance of so doing which is delightfully 
deceptive. 

They are original, and regard you between the 



40 American Notes 

brows with unabashed eyes as a sister might look 
at her brother. They are instructed, too, in the 
folly and vanity of the male mind, for they have 
associated with " the boys " from babyhood, and 
can discerningly minister to both vices or pleas- 
antly snub the possessor. They possess, more- 
over, a life among themselves, independent of any 
masculine associations. They have societies and 
clubs and unlimited tea-fights where all the guests 
are girls. They are self-possessed, without part- 
ing with any tenderness that is their sex-right ; 
they understand ; they can take care of them- 
selves ; they are superbly independent. When 
you ask them what makes them so charming, 
they say : — 

"It is because we are better educated than your 
girls, and — and we are more sensible in regard to 
men. We have good times all round, but we 
are n't taught to regard every man as a possible 
husband. Nor is he expected to marry the first 
girl he calls on regularly." 

Yes, they have good times, their freedom is 
large, and they do not abuse it. They can go 
driving with young men and receive visits from 
young men to an extent that would make an 
English mother wink with horror, and neither 



American Politics 41 

driver nor drivee has a thought beyond the enjoy- 
ment of a good time. As certain, also, of their 
own poets have said : — 

** Man is fire and woman is tow. 
And the devil he comes and begins to blow." 

In America the tow is soaked in a solution 
that makes it fire-proof, in absolute liberty and 
large knowledge ; consequently, accidents do not 
exceed the regular percentage arranged by the 
devil for each class and climate under the skies. 

But the freedom of the young girl has its draw- 
backs. She is — I say it with all reluctance — - 
irreverent, from her forty-dollar bonnet to the 
buckles in her eighteen-dollar shoes. She talks 
flippantly to her parents and men old enough to 
be her grandfather. She has a prescriptive right 
to the society of the man who arrives. The 
parents admit it. 

This is sometimes embarrassing, especially when 
you call on a man and his wife for the sake of 
information — the one being a merchant of varied 
knowledge, the other a woman of the world. In 
five minutes your host has vanished. In another 
five his wife has followed him, and you are left 
alone with a very charming maiden, doubtless, but 



42 American Notes 

certainly not the person you came to see. She 
chatters, and you grin, but you leave with the very 
strong impression of a wasted morning. This has 
been my experience once or twice. I have even 
said as pointedly as I dared to a man: — 

"I came to see you." 

" You 'd better see me in my office, then. The 
house belongs to my women folk — to my daugh- 
ter, that is to say." 

He spoke the truth. The American of wealth is 
owned by his family. They exploit him for bull- 
ion. The women get the ha'pence, the kicks are all 
his own. Nothing is too good for an American's 
daughter (I speak here of the moneyed classes). 

The girls take every gift as a matter of course, 
and yet they develop greatly when a catastrophe 
arrives and the man of many millions goes up or 
goes down, and his daughters take to stenography 
or typewriting. I have heard many tales of 
heroism from the lips of girls who counted the 
principals among their friends. The crash came, 
Mamie, or Hattie, or Sadie, gave up their maid, 
their carriages and candy, and with a No. 2 Rem- 
ington and a stout heart set about earning their 
daily bread. 

" And did I drop her from the list of my friends ? 



American Politics 43 

No, sir," said a scarlet-lipped vision in white lace ; 
" that might happen to us any day." 

It may be this sense of possible disaster in the 
air that makes San Francisco society go with so 
captivating a rush and whirl. Recklessness is in 
the air. I can't explain where it comes from, but 
there it is. The roaring winds of the Pacific 
make you drunk to begin with. The aggressive 
luxury on all sides helps out the intoxication, and 
you spin forever " down the ringing grooves of 
change " (there is no small change, by the way, 
west of the Rockies) as long as money lasts. 
They make greatly and they spend lavishly ; not 
only the rich, but the artisans, who pay nearly five 
pounds for a suit of clothes, and for other luxuries 
in proportion. 

The young men rejoice in the days of their 
youth. They gamble, yacht, race, enjoy prize- 
fights and cock-fights, the one openly, the other in 
secret ; they establish luxurious clubs ; they break 
themselves over horse-flesh and other things, and 
they are instant in a quarrel. At twenty they are 
experienced in business, embark in vast enterprises, 
take partners as experienced as themselves, and go 
to pieces with as much splendor as their neighbors. 
Remember that the men who stocked California in 



44 American Notes 

the fifties were physically, and, as far as regards 
certain tough virtues, the pick of the earth. The 
inept and the weakly died en route^ or went under 
in the days of construction. To this nucleus were 
added all the races of the Continent — French, 
Italian, German, and, of course, the Jew. 

The result you can see in the large-boned, deep- 
chested, delicate-handed women, and long, elastic, 
well-built boys. It needs no little golden badge 
swinging from the watch-chain to mark the native 
son of the golden West, the country-bred of 
California. 

Him I love because he is devoid of fear, carries 
himself like a man, and has a heart as big as his 
books. I fancy, too, he knows how to enjoy the 
blessings of life that his province so abundantly 
bestows upon him. At least, I heard a little rat 
of a creature with hock-bottle shoulders explaining 
that a man from Chicago could pull the eye-teeth 
of a Californian in business. 

Well, if I lived in fairy-land, where cherries 
were as big as plums, plums as big as apples, 
and strawberries of no account, where the proces- 
sion of the fruits of the seasons was like a pageant 
in a Drury Lane pantomime and the dry air was 
wine, I should let business slide once in a way and 



American Politics 45 

kick up my heels with my fellows. The tale of 
the resources of California — vegetable and min- 
eral — is a fairy-tale. You can read it in books. 
You would never believe me. 

All manner of nourishing food, from sea-fish to 
beef, may be bought at the lowest prices, and the 
people are consequently well-developed and of a 
high stomach. They demand ten shillings for 
tinkering a jammed lock of a trunk ; they receive 
sixteen shillings a day for working as carpenters ; 
they spend many sixpences on very bad cigars, 
which the poorest of them smoke, and they go 
mad over a prize-fight. When they disagree they 
do so fatally, with fire-arms in their hands, and on 
the public streets. I was just clear of Mission 
Street when the trouble began between two gentle- 
men, one of whom perforated the other. 

When a policeman, whose name I do not 
recollect, " fatally shot Ed Hearney " for attempt- 
ing to escape arrest, I was in the next street. For 
these things I am thankful. It is enough to 
travel with a policeman in a tram-car, and, while 
he arranges his coat-tails as he sits down, to catch 
sight of a loaded revolver. It is enough to know 
that fifty per cent of the men in the public saloons 
carry pistols about them. 



46 American Notes 

The Chinaman waylays his adversary, and me- 
thodically chops him to pieces with his hatchet. 
Then the press roars about the brutal ferocity of 
the pagan. 

The Italian reconstructs his friend with a long 
knife. The press complains of the waywardness 
of the alien. 

The Irishman and the native Californian in 
their hours of discontent use the revolver, not 
once, but six times. The press records the fact, 
and asks in the next column whether the world 
can parallel the progress of San Francisco. The 
American who loves his country will tell you that 
this sort of thing is confined to the lower classes. 
Just at present an ex-judge who was sent to jail 
by another judge (upon my word I cannot tell 
whether these titles mean anything) is breathing 
red-hot vengeance against his enemy. The papers 
have interviewed both parties, and confidently 
expect a fatal issue. 

Now, let me draw breath and curse the negro 
waiter, and through him the negro in service 
generally. He has been made a citizen with a 
vote, consequently both political parties play with 
him. But that is neither here nor there. He 
will commit in one meal every betise that a senllion 



American Politics 47 

fresh from the plow-tail is capable of, and he will 
continue to repeat those faults. He is as complete 
a heavy-footed, uncomprehending, bungle-fisted fool 
as zny me?n-sahib in the East ever took into her estab- 
lishment. But he is according to law a free and 
independent citizen — consequently above reproof 
or criticism. He, and he alone, in this insane city, 
will wait at table (the Chinaman does n't count). 

He Is untrained, inept, but he will fill the place 
and draw the pay. Now, God and his father's fate 
made him intellectually inferior to the Oriental. 
He insists on pretending that he serves tables by 
accident — as a sort of amusement. He wishes 
you to understand this little fact. You wish to 
eat your meals, and, if possible, to have them 
properly served. He is a big, black, vain baby 
and a man rolled into one. 

A colored gentleman who insisted on getting 
me pie when I wanted something else, demanded 
information about India. I gave him scine facts 
about wages. 

" Oh, hell !" said he, cheerfully, "that would n't 
keep me in cigars for a month." 

Then he fawned on me for a ten-cent piece. 
Later he took it upon himself to pity the natives 
of India. "Heathens," he called them — this 



48 American Notes 

woolly one, whose race has been the butt of every 
comedy on the native stage since the beginning. 
And I turned and saw by the head upon his 
shoulders that he was a Yoruba man, if there be 
any truth in ethnological castes. He did his 
thinking in English, but he was a Yoruba negro, 
and the race type had remained the same through- 
out his generations. And the room was full of 
other races — some that looked exactly like Gallas 
(but the trade was never recruited from that side 
of Africa), some duplicates of Cameroon heads, 
and some Kroomen, if ever Kroomen wore even- 
ing dress. 

The American does not consider little matters 
of descent, though by this time he ought to know 
all about " damnable heredity." As a general 
rule he keeps himself very far from the negro, 
and says things about him that are not pretty. 
There are six million negroes, more or less, in 
the States, and they are increasing. The Ameri- 
can, once having made them citizens, cannot 
unmake them. He says. In his newspapers, they 
ought to be elevated by education. He is trying 
this, but it is likely to be a long job, because 
black blood is much more adhesive than white, 
and throws back with annoying persistence. 



American Politics 49 

When the negro gets religion he returns directly 
as a hiving/' -ee to the first instincts of his people. 
Just now/ 1 wave of religion is sweeping over 
some of / le Southern States. 

Up to ihc present two Messiahs and a Daniel 
have appeared, and several human sacrifices have 
been offered up to these incarnations. The 
Daniel managed to get three young men, who he 
insisted were Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, 
to walk into a blast furnace, guaranteeing non- 
combustion. They did not return. I have seen 
nothing of this kind, but I have attended a negro 
church. They pray, or are caused to pray by 
themselves in this country. The congregation 
were moved by the spirit to groans and tears, and 
one of them danced up the aisle to the mourners' 
bench. The motive may have been genuine. 
The movements of the shaken body were those 
of a Zanzibar stick dance, such as you see at 
Aden on the coal-boats, and even as I watched 
the people, the links that bound them to the 
white man snapped one by one, and I saw before 
me the hubshi (woolly hair) praying to a God he 
did not understand. Those neatly dressed folk 
on the benches, and the gr^y-headed elder by the 
window, were savages, neither more nor less. 

4 



50 American Notes 

What will the American do with the negro ? 
The South will not consort with him. In some 
States miscegenation is a penal offence. The 
North is every year less and less in need of his 
services. 

And he will not disappear. He will continue 
as a problem. His friends will urge that he is as 
good as the white man. His enemies — well, you 
can guess what his enemies will do from a little 
incident that followed on a recent appointment by 
the President. He made a negro an assistant in 
a post-office where — think of it ! — he had to 
work at the next desk to a white girl, the daughter 
of a colonel, one of the first families of Georgia's 
modern chivalry, and all the weary, weary rest of 
it. The Southern chivalry howled, and hanged 
or burned some one in effigy. Perhaps it was 
the President, and perhaps it was the negro — 
but the principle remains the same. They said 
it was an insult. It is not good to be a negro in 
the land of the free and the home of the brave. 

But this is nothing to do with San Francisco 
and her merry maidens, her strong, swaggermg 
men, and her wealth of gold and pride. They 
bore me to a banquet in honor of a brave lieuten- 
ant — Carlin, of the " Vandalia " — who stuck 



American Politics 51 

by his ship in the great cyclone at Apia and com- 
ported himself as an officer should. On that 
occasion — 't was at the Bohemian Club — I 
heard oratory with the roundest of o's, and de- 
voured a dinner the memory of which will descend 
with me into the hungry grave. 

There were about forty speeches delivered, and 
not one of them was average or ordinary. It was 
my first introduction to the American eagle 
screaming for all it was worth. The lieutenant's 
heroism served as a peg from which the silver- 
tongued ones turned themselves loose and kicked. 

They ransacked the clouds of sunset, the 
thunderbolts of heaven, the deeps of hell, and the 
splendor of the resurrection for tropes and met- 
aphors, and hurled the result at the head of the 
guest of the evening. 

Never since the morning stars sung together for 
joy, I learned, had an amazed creation witnessed 
such superhuman bravery as that displayed by the 
American navy in the Samoa cyclone. Till earth 
rotted in the phosphorescent star-and-stripe slime 
of a decayed universe, that god-like gallantry 
would not be forgotten. I grieve that I cannot 
give the exact words. My attempt at reproduc- 
ing their spirit is pale and inadequate. I sat 



52 American Notes 

bewildered on a coruscating Niagara of blatherum- 
skite. It was magnificent — it was stupendous 
— and I was conscious of a wicked desire to hide 
my face in a napkin and grin. Then, according 
to rule, they produced their dead, and across the 
snowy table-cloths dragged the corpse of every 
man slain in the Civil War, and hurled defiance at 
" our natural enemy " (England, so please you), 
'' with her chain of fortresses across the world." 
Thereafter they glorified their nation afresh from 
the beginning, in case any detail should have been 
overlooked, and that made me uncomfortable for 
their sakes. How in the world can a white man, 
a sahib, of our blood, stand up and plaster praise 
on his own country ? He can think as highly as 
he likes, but this open-mouthed vehemence of 
adoration struck me almost as indelicate. My 
hosts talked for rather more than three hours, and 
at the end seemed ready for three hours more. 

But when the lieutenant — such a big, brave, 
gentle giant — rose to his feet, he delivered what 
seemed to me as the speech of the evening. I 
remember nearly the whole of it, and it ran some- 
thing in this way : — 

" Gentlemen — It 's very good of you to give 
me this dinner and to tell me all these pretty 



American Politics 53 

things, but what I want you to understand — the 
fact is, what we want and what we ought to get 
at once, is a navy — more ships — lots of 'em — " 

Then we howled the top of the roof off, and I 
for one fell in love with Carlin on the spot. 
Wallah ! He was a man. 

The prince among merchants bid me take no 
heed to the warlike sentiments of some of the old 
generals. 

"The sky-rockets are thrown in for effect," 
quoth he, " and whenever we get on our hind legs 
we always express a desire to chaw up England. 
It 's a sort of family affair." 

And, indeed, when you come to think of it, 
there is no other country for the American public 
speaker to trample upon. 

France has Germany ; we have Russia ; for 
Italy Austria is provided ; and the humblest Pathan 
possesses an ancestral enemy. 

Only America stands out of the racket, and there- 
fore to be in fashion makes a sand-bag of the mother 
country, and hangs her when occasion requires. 

" The chain of fortresses " man, a fascinating 
talker, explained to me after the affair that he 
was compelled to blow off steam. Everybody 
expected it. 



54 American Notes 

When we had chanted " The Star Spangled 
Banner " not more than eight times, we adjourned. 
America is a very great country, but it is not yet 
heaven, with electric lights and plush fittings, as 
the speakers professed to believe. My listening 
mind went back to the politicians in the saloon, 
who wasted no time in talking about freedom, but 
quietly made arrangements to impose their will on 
the citizens. 

" The judge is a great man, but give thy pres- 
ents to the clerk," as the proverb saith. 

And what more remains to tell ? I cannot 
write connectedly, because I am in love with all 
those girls aforesaid, and some others who do not 
appear in the invoice. The typewriter is an in- 
stitution of which the comic papers make much 
capital, but she is vastly convenient. She and a 
companion rent a room in a business quarter, and, 
aided by a typewriting machine, copy MSS. at the 
rate of six annas a page. Only a woman can 
operate a typewriting machine, because she has 
served apprenticeship to the sewing machine. She 
can earn as much as one hundred dollars a month, 
and professes to regard this form of bread-winning 
as her natural destiny. But, oh ! how she hates it 
in her heart of hearts ! When I had got over 



American Politics 55 

the surprise of doing business with and trying to 
give orders to a young woman of coldly, clerkly 
aspect intrenched behind gold-rimmed spectacles, 
I made inquiries concerning the pleasures of this 
independence. They liked it — -indeed they did. 
'Twas the natural fate of almost all girls — the 
recoo-nized custom in America — and I was a 
barbarian not to see it in that light. 

" Well, and after ? " said I. " What happens ? " 

" VVe wori: for ou". hread." 

" And then what do you expect ? " 

" Then we shall work for our bread. * 

" Till you die ? " 

" Ye-es — unless — " 

" Unless what ? This is your business, you 
know. A man works until he dies," 

" So shall we " — this without enthusiasm — "I 
suppose." 

Said the partner in the firm, audaciously : — 

" Sometimes we marry our employes — at least, 
that 's what the newspapers say." 

The hand banged on half a dozen of the keys of 
the machine at once. " Yet I don't care. I hate it 
— I hate it — I hate it — and you need n't look so ! " 

The senior partner was regarding the rebel with 
grave-eyed reproach. 



56 American Notes 

" I thought you did," said I. " I don't suppose 
American girls are much different from English 
ones in instinct." 

" Is n't it Theophlle Gautler who says that the 
only difference between country and country lie in 
the slang and the uniform of the police ? " 

Now, in the name of all the gods at once, what 
is one to say to a young lady (who in England 
would be a person) who earns her own bread, and 
very naturally ha^es the employ, and slinks out-of- 
the-way quotations at 'your head ? That one falls 
in love with tier goes without saying, but that is 
not e-riough. 

A mission should be established. 



Ill 

American Salmon 



'the race is neither to the swift nor the battle to the 
strong-, but time and chance cometh to all. 

T HAVE lived! 

-*• The American Continent may now sink 
under the sea, tor I have taken the best that it 
yields, and the best was neither dollars, love, nor 
real estate. 

Hear now, gentlemen of the Punjab Fishing 
Club, who whip the reaches of the Tavi, and you 
who painfully import trout over to Octamund, 
and I will tell you how old man California and I 
went fishing, and you shall envy. 

We returned from The Dalles to Portland by 
the way we had come, the steamer stopping en 
route to pick up a night's catch of one of the 
salmon wheels on the river, and to deliver it at a 
cannery down-stream. 

When the proprietor of the wheel announced 



58 American Notes 

that his take was two thousand two hundred and 
thirty pounds weight of fish, " and not a heavy 
catch neither," I thought he lied. But he sent 
the boxes aboard, and I counted the salmon by 
the hundred — huge fifty-pounders hardly dead, 
scores of twenty and thirty pounders, and a host 
of smaller fish. They were all Chenook salmon, 
as distinguished from the " steel head " and the 
" silver side." That is to say, they were royal 
salmon, and California and I dropped a tear over 
them, as monarchs who deserved a better fate ; 
but the lust of slaughter entered into our souls, 
and we talked fish and forgot the mountain seer, 
ery that had so Tnuved us a day before. 

The steamer halted at a rude wooden warehouse 
built on piles in a lonely reach of the river, and 
sent in the fish. I follov/ed them up a scale- 
strewn, fishy incline that led to the cannery. The 
crazy building was quivering with the machinery 
on its floors, and a glittering bank of tin scraps 
twenty feet high showed where the waste was 
thrown after the cans had been punched. 

Only Chinamen were employed on the work, 
and they looked like blood-besmeared yellow devils 
as they crossed the rifts of sunlight that lay upon 
the floor. When our consignment arrived, the 



American Salmon 59 

rough wooden boxes broke of themselves as they 
were dumped down under a jet of water, and the 
salmon burst out in a stream of quicksilver. A 
Chinaman jerked up a twenty-pounder, beheaded 
and detailed it with two swift strokes of a knife, 
flicked out its internal arrangements with a third, 
and cast it into a blood-dyed tank. The headless 
fish leaped from under his hands as though they 
were facing a rapid. Other Chinamen pulled them 
from the vat and thrust them under a thing like a 
chaff-cutter, which, descending, hewed them into 
unseemly red gobbets fit for the can. 

More Chinamen, with yellow, crooked fingers, 
jammed the stuff into the cans, which slid down 
some marvellous machine forthwith, soldering their 
own tops as they passed. Each can was hastily 
tested for flaws, and then sunk with a hundred 
companions into a vat of boiling water, there to 
be half cooked for a few minutes. The cans 
bulged slightly after the operation, and were 
therefore slidden along by the trolleyful to men 
with needles and soldering-irons who vented them 
and soldered the aperture. Except for the label, 
the " Finest Columbia Salmon " was ready for the 
market. I was impressed not so much with the 
speed of the manufacture as the character of 



6o American Notes 

the factory. Inside, on a floor ninety by forty, 
the most civilized and murderous of machinery. 
Outside, three footsteps, the thick-growing pines 
and the immense soHtude of the hills. Our 
steamer only stayed twenty minutes at that place, 
but I counted two hundred and forty finished cans 
made from the catch of the previous night ere I 
left the slippery, blood-stained, scale-spangled, oily 
floors and the offal-smeared Chinamen. 

We reached Portland, California and I cry- 
ing for salmon, and a real-estate man, to whom 
we had been intrusted by an insurance man, 
met us in the street, saying that fifteen miles 
away, across country, we should come upon a 
place called Clackamas, where we might per- 
chance find what we desired. And California, 
his coat-tails flying in the wind, ran to a livery- 
stable and chartered a wagon and team forthwith. 
I could push the wagon about with one hand, so 
light was its structure. The team was purely 
American — that is to say, almost human in its 
intelligence and docility. Some one said that the 
roads were not good on the way to Clackamas, 
and warned us against smashing the springs. 
" Portland," who had watched the preparations, 
finally reckoned "He'd come along, tooj" and 



American Salmon 6i 

under heavenly skies we three companions of a 
day set forth, California carefully lashing our rods 
into the carriage, and the by-standers overwhelm- 
ing us with directions as to the saw-mills we were 
to pass, the ferries we were to cross, and the sign- 
posts we were to seek signs from. Half a mile 
from this city of fifty thousand souls we struck 
(and this must be taken literally) a plank road that 
would have been a disgrace to an Irish village. 

Then six miles of macadamized road showed us 
that the team could move. A railway ran between 
us and the banks of the Willamette, and another 
above us through the mountains. All the land 
was dotted with small townships, and the roads 
were full of farmers in their town wagons, bunches 
of tow-haired, boggle-eyed urchins sitting in the 
hay behind. The men generally looked like loaf- 
ers, but their women were all well dressed. 

Brown braiding on a tailor-made jacket does 
not, however, consort with hay-wagons. Then 
we struck into the woods along what California 
called a camina reale — a good road — and Port- 
land a " fair track." It wound in and out among 
fire-blackened stumps under pine-trees, along the 
corners of log fences, through hollows, which 
must be hopeless marsh in the winter, and up 



62 American Notes 

absurd gradients. But nowhere throughout its 
length did I see any evidence of road-making. 
There was a track — you couldn't well get ofF 
it, and it was all you could do to stay on it. The 
dust lay a foot thick in the blind ruts, and under 
the dust we found bits of planking and bundles of 
brushwood that sent the wagon bounding into the 
air. The journey in itself was a delight. Some- 
times we crashed through bracken ; anon, where 
the blackberries grew rankest, we found a lonely 
little cemetery, the wooden rails all awry and the 
pitiful, stumpy head-stones nodding drunkenly at 
the soft green mullions. Then, with oaths and 
the sound of rent underwood, a yoke of mighty 
bulls would swing down a " skid " road, hauling 
a forty-foot log along a rudely made slide. 

A valley full of wheat and cherry-trees suc- 
ceeded, and halting at a house, we bought ten- 
pound weight of luscious black cherries for 
something less than a rupee, and got a drink of 
icy-cold water for nothing, while the untended 
team browsed sagaciously by the road-side. Once 
we found a way-side camp of horse-dealers loung- 
ing by a pool, ready for a sale or a swap, and once 
two sun-tanned youngsters shot down a hill on 
Indian ponies, their full creels banging from the 



American Salmon 63 

high-pommelled saddle. They had been fishing, 
and were our brethren, therefore. We shouted 
aloud in chorus to scare a wild cat ; we squabbled 
over the reasons that had led a snake to cross a 
road; we heaved bits of bark at a venturesome 
chipmunk, who was really the little gray squirrel 
of India, and had come to call on me; we lost 
our way, and got the wagon so beautifully fixed on 
a khud-bound road that we had to tie the two hind 
wheels to get it down. 

Above all, California told tales of Nevada and 
Arizona, of lonely nights spent out prospecting, 
the slaughter of deer and the chase of men, of 
woman — lovely woman — who is a firebrand in 
a Western city and leads to the popping of pistols, 
and of the sudden changes and chances of Fortune, 
who delights in making the miner or the lumber- 
man a quadruplicate millionaire and in " busting " 
the railroad king. 

That was a day to be remembered, and it had 
only begun when we drew rein at a tiny farm- 
house on the banks of the Clackamas and sought 
horse feed and lodging, ere we hastened to the 
river that broke over a weir not a quarter of a 
mile away. Imagine a stream seventy yards 
broad divided by a pebbly island, running over 



64 American Notes 

seductive " rIfHes " and swirling into deep, quiet 
pools, where the good salmon goes to smoke his 
pipe after meals. Get such a stream amid fields 
of breast-high crops surrounded by hills of pines, 
throw in where you please quiet water, long- 
fenced meadows, and a hundred-foot bluff just to 
keep the scenery from growing too monotonous, 
and you will get some faint notion of the Clacka- 
mas. The weir had been erected to pen the 
Chenook salmon from going further up-stream. 
We could see them, twenty or thirty pounds, by 
the score in the deep pools, or flying madly against 
the weir and foolishly skinning their noses. They 
were not our prey, for they would not rise at a 
fly, and we knew it. All the same, when one 
made his leap against the weir, and landed on the 
foot-plank with a jar that shook the board I was 
standing on, I would fain have claimed him for 
my own capture. 

Portland had no rod. He held the gaff and 
the whiskey. California sniffed up-stream and 
down-stream, across the racing water, chose his 
ground, and let the gaudy fly drop in the tail of 
a riflle. I was getting my rod together, when I 
heard the joyous shriek of the reel and the yells 
of California, and three feet of Hving silver leaped 



American Salmon 65 

into the air far across the water. The forces 
were engaged. 

The salmon tore up-stream, the tense line 
cutting the water like a tide-rip behind him, and 
the light bamboo bowed to breaking. What hap- 
pened thereafter I cannot tell. California swore 
and prayed, and Portland shouted advice, and I 
did all three for what appeared to be half a day, 
but was in reality a little over a quarter of an 
hour, and sullenly our fish came home with spurts 
of temper, dashes head on and sarabands in the 
air, but home to the bank came he, and the re- 
morseless reel gathered up the thread of his life 
inch by inch. We landed him in a little bay, and 
the spring weight in his gorgeous gills checked at 
eleven and one half pounds. Eleven and one 
half pounds of fighting salmon ! We danced a 
war-dance on the pebbles, and California caught 
me round the waist in a hug that went near to 
breaking my ribs, while he shouted : — 

" Partner ! Partner ! This is glory ! Now you 
catch your fish ! Twenty-four years I Ve waited 
for this ! " 

I went into that icy-cold river and made my 
cast just above the weir, and all but foul-hooked 
a blue-and-black water-snake with a coral mouth 

5 



66 American Notes 

who coiled herself on a stone and hissed male- 
dictions. 

The next cast — ah, the pride of it, the regal 
splendor of it ! the thrill that ran down from 
finger-tip to toe ! Then the water boiled. He 
broke for the fly and got it. There remained 
enough sense in me to give him all he wanted 
when he jumped not once, but twenty times, 
before the up-stream flight that ran my line out 
to the last half-dozen turns, and I saw the nickelled 
reel-bar glitter under the thinning green coils. 
My thumb was burned deep when I strove to 
stopper the line. 

I did not feel it till later, for my soul was out 
in the dancing weir, praying for him to turn ere 
he took my tackle away. And the prayer was 
heard. As I bowed back, the butt of the rod on 
my left hip-bone and the top joint dipping like 
unto a weeping willow, he turned and accepted 
each inch of slack that I could by any means get 
in as a favor from on high. There lie several 
sorts of success in this world that taste well in 
the moment of enjoyment, but I question whether 
the stealthy theft of line from an able-bodied 
salmon who knows exactly what you are doing 
and why yoii are doing it is not sweeter than any 



American Salmon 67 

other victory within human scope. Like Cali- 
fornia's fish, he ran at me head on, and leaped 
against the line, but the Lord gave me two hun- 
dred and fifty pairs of fingers in that hour. The 
banks and the pine-trees danced dizzily round me, 
but I only reeled — reeled as for life — reeled for 
hours, and at the end of the reeling continued to 
give him the butt while he sulked in a pool. 
California was further up the reach, and with the 
corner of my eye I could see him casting with 
long casts and much skill. Then he struck, and 
my fish broke for the weir in the same instant, 
and down the reach we came, California and I, 
reel answering reel even as the morning stars sing 
together. 

The first wild enthusiasm of capture had died 
away. We were both at work now in deadly 
earnest to prevent the lines fouling, to stall off a 
down-stream rush for shaggy water just above the 
weir, and at the same time to get the fish into 
the shallow bay down-stream that gave the best 
practicable landing. Portland bid us both be of 
good heart, and volunteered to take the rod from 
my hands. 

I would rather have died among the pebbles 
than surrender my right to play and land a salmon, 



68 American Notes 

weight unknown, with an eight-ounce rod. I 
heard California, at my ear, it seemed, gasping : 
" He 's a fighter from Fightersville, sure ! " as his 
fish made a fresh break across the stream. I saw 
Portland fall off a log fence, break the overhanging 
bank, and clatter down to the pebbles, all sand and 
landing-net, and I dropped on a log to rest for a 
moment. As I drew breath the weary hands 
slackened their hold, and I forgot to give him the 
butt. 

A wild scutter in the water, a plunge, and a 
break for the head-waters of the Clackamas was 
my reward, and the weary toil of reeling in with 
one eye under the water and the other on the top 
joint of the rod was renewed. Worst of all, I was 
blocking California's path to the little landing bay 
aforesaid, and he had to halt and tire his prize 
where he was. 

" The father of all the salmon ! " he shouted. 
" For the love of Heaven, get your trout to bank, 
Johnny Bull!'' 

But I could do no more. Even the insult failed 
to move me. The rest of the game was with the 
salmon. He suffered himself to be drawn, skip- 
ping with pretended delight at getting to the haven 
where I would fain bring him. Yet no sooner 



American Salmon 69 

did he feel shoal water under his ponderous belly 
than he backed like a torpedo-boat, and the snarl 
of the reel told me that my labor was in vain. A 
dozen times, at least, this happened ere the line 
hinted he had given up the battle and would be 
towed in. He was towed. The landing-net was 
useless for one of his size, and I would not have 
him gaffed. I stepped into the shallows and 
heaved him out with a respectful hand under the 
gill, for which kindness he battered me about the 
legs with his tail, and I felt the strength of him 
and was proud. California had taken my place in 
the shallows, his fish hard held. I was up the 
bank lying full length on the sweet-scented grass 
and gasping in company with my first salmon 
caught, played and landed on an eight-ounce rod. 
My hands were cut and bleeding, I was dripping 
with sweat, spangled like a harlequin with scales, 
water from my waist down, nose peeled by the sun, 
but utterly, supremely, and consummately happy. 

The beauty, the darling, the daisy, my Salmon 
Bahadur, weighed twelve pounds, and I had been 
seven-and-thirty minutes bringing him to bank ! 
He had been lightly hooked on the angle of the 
right jaw, and the hook had not wearied him. 
That hour I sat among princes and crowned 



70 American Notes 

heads greater than them all. Below the bank we 
heard California scuffling with his salmon and 
swearing Spanish oaths. Portland and I assisted 
at the capture, and the fish dragged the spring 
balance out by the roots. It was only constructed 
to weigh up to fifteen pounds. We stretched the 
three fish on the grass — the eleven and a half, 
the twelve and fifteen pounder — and we gave an 
oath that all who came after should merely be 
weighed and put back again. 

How shall I tell the glories of that day so that 
you may be interested ? Again and again did 
California and I prance down that reach to the 
little bay, each with a salmon in tow, and land 
him ii^ the shallows. Then Portland took my rod 
and caught some ten-pounders, and my spoon was 
carried away by an unknown leviathan. Each 
fish, for the merits of the three that had died so 
gamely, was hastily hooked on the balance and 
flung back. Portland recorded the weight in a 
pocket-book, for he was a real-estate man. Each 
fish fought for all he was worth, and none more 
savagely than the smallest, a game little six-pounder. 
At the end of six hours we added up the list. Read 
it. Total : Sixteen fish ; aggregate weight, one 
hundred and forty pounds. The score in detail runs 



American Salmon 71 

something like this — it is only interesting to 
those concerned : fifteen, eleven and a half, twelve, 
ten, nine and three quarters, eight, and so forth 5 
as I have said, nothing under six pounds, and 
three ten-pounders. 

Very solemnly and thankfully we put up our 
rods — it was glory enough for all time — and 
returned weeping in each other's arms, weeping 
tears of pure joy, to that simple, bare-legged family 
in the packing-case house by the water-side. 

The old farmer recollected days and nights of 
fierce warfare with the Indians " way back in the 
fifties," when every ripple of the Columbia River 
and her tributaries hid covert danger. God had 
dowered him with a queer, crooked gift of expres- 
sion and a fierce anxiety for the welfare of his two 
little sons — tanned and reserved children, who 
attended school daily and spoke good English in a 
strange tongue. 

His wife was an austere woman, who had once 
been kindly, and perhaps handsome. 

Very many years of toil had taken the elasticity 
out of step and voice. She looked for nothing 
better than everlasting work — the chafing detail 
of housework — and then a grave somewhere up 
the hill among the blackberries and the pines. 



72 American Notes 

But in her grim way she sympathized with her 
eldest daughter, a small and silent maiden of 
eighteen, who had thoughts very far from the meals 
she tended and the pans she scoured. 

We stumbled into the household at a crisis, and 
there was a deal of downright humanity in that 
same. A bad, wicked dress-maker had promised 
the maiden a dress in time for a to-morrow's rail- 
way journey, and though the barefooted Georgy, 
who stood in very wholesome awe of his sister, 
had scoured the woods on a pony in search, that 
dress never arrived. So, with sorrow in her heart 
and a hundred Sister-Anne glances up the road, 
she waited upon the strangers and, I doubt not, 
cursed them for the wants that stood between her 
and her need for tears. It was a genuine little 
tragedy. The mother, in a heavy, passionless 
voice, rebuked her impatience, yet sat up far into 
the night, bowed over a heap of sewing for the 
daughter's benefit. 

These things I beheld in the long marigold- 
scented twilight and whispering night, loafing 
round the little house with California, who un- 
folded himself like a lotus to the moon, or in the 
little boarded bunk that was our bedroom, swap- 
ping tales with Portland and the old man. 



American Salmon 73 

Most of the yarns began in this way : — 
" Red Larry was a bull-puncher back of Lone 
County, Montana," or " There was a man riding 
the trail met a jack-rabbit sitting in a cactus," or 
" 'Bout the time of the San Diego land boom, a 
woman from Monterey," etc. 

You can try to piece out for yourselves what 
sort of stories they were. 



IV 
The Yellowstone 



jNCE upon a time there was a carter who 
brought his team and a friend into the Yel- 
lowstone Park without due thought. Presently 
they came upon a few of the natural beauties of 
the place, and that carter turned his team into his 
friend's team, howling : — 

'' Get out o' this, Jim. All hell 's alight under 



our noses 



And they called the place Hell's Half-Acre to 
this day to witness if the carter lied. 

We, too, the old lady from Chicago, her hus- 
band, Tom, and the good little mares, came to 
Hell's Half-Acre, which is about sixty acres in 
extent, and when Tom said : — 

" Would you like to drive over it ? " 

We said : — 

" Certainly not, and if you do we shall report 
you to the park authorities.'' 



The Yellowstone 75 

There was a plain, blistered, peeled, and abomi- 
nable, and it was given over to the sportings and 
spoutings of devils who threw mud, and steam, and 
dirt at each other with whoops, and halloos, and 
bellowing curses. 

The places smelled of the refuse of the pit, and 
that odor mixed with the clean, wholesome aroma 
of the pines in our nostrils throughout the day. 

This Yellowstone Park is laid out like Ollen- 
dorf, in exercises of progressive difficulty. Hell's 
Half-Acre was a prelude to ten or twelve miles of 
geyser formation. 

We passed hot streams boiling in the forest ; 
saw whiffs of steam beyond these, and yet other 
whiffs breaking through the misty green hills in 
the far distance; we trampled on sulphur in 
crystals, and sniffed things much worse than any 
sulphur which is known to the upper world ; and 
so journeying, bewildered with the novelty, came 
upon a really park-like place where Tom suggested 
we should get out and play with the geysers on 

foot. 

Imagine mighty green fields splattered with lime- 
beds, all the flowers of the summer growing up to 
the very edge of the lime. That was our first 
glimpse of the geyser basins. 



76 American Notes 

The buggy ha^d pulled up close to a rough, 
broken, blistered cone of spelter stuff between ten 
and twenty feet high. There was trouble in that 
place — moaning, splashing, gurgling, and the 
clank of machinery. A spurt of boiling water 
jumped into the air, and a wash of water fol- 
lowed. 

I removed swiftly. The old lady from Chicago 
shrieked. " What a wicked waste ! " said her 
husband. 

I think they call it the Riverside Geyser. Its 
spout was torn and ragged like the mouth of a 
gun when a shell has burst there. It grumbled 
madly for a moment or two, and then was still. 
I crept over the steaming lime — it was the burn- 
ing marl on which Satan lay — and looked fear- 
fully down its mouth. You should never look a 
gift geyser in the mouth. 

I beheld a horrible, slippery, slimy funnel with 
water rising and falling ten feet at a time. Then 
the water rose to lip level with a rush, and an 
infernal bubbling troubled this Devil's Bethesda 
before the sullen heave of the crest of a wave 
lapped over the edge and made me run. 

Mark the nature of the human soul ! I had 
begun with awe, not to say terror, for this was my 



The Yellowstone 'jj 

first experience of such things. I stepped back 
from the banks of the Riverside Geyser, saying : — 

" Pooh ! Is that all it can do ? " 

Yet for aught I knew, the whole thing might 
have blown up at a minute's notice, she, he, or it 
being an arrangement of uncertain temper. 

We drifted on, up that miraculous valley. On 
either side of us were hills from a thousand or 
fifteen hundred feet high, wooded from crest to 
heel. As far as the eye could range forward were 
columns of steam in the air, misshapen lumps of 
lime, mist-like preadamite monsters, still pools 
of turquoise-blue stretches of blue corn-flowers, a 
river that coiled on itself twenty times, pointed 
bowlders of strange colors, and ridges of glaring, 
staring white. 

A moon-faced trooper of German extraction — 
never was park so carefully patrolled — came up 
to inform us that as yet we had not seen any of 
the real geysers ; that they were all a mile or so 
up the valley, and tastefully scattered round the 
hotel in which we would rest for the night. 

America is a free country, but the citizens look 
down on the soldier. I had to entertain that 
trooper. The old lady from Chicago would have 
none of him; so we loafed alone together, now 



yS American Notes 

across half-rotten pine logs sunk in swampy 
ground, anon over the ringing geyser formation, 
then pounding through river-sand or brushing 
knee-deep through long grass. 

" And why did you enlist ? " said I. 

The moon-faced one's face began to work. I 
thought he would have a fit, but he told me a 
story instead — such a nice tale of a naughty little 
girl who wrote pretty love letters to two men at 
once. She was a simple village wife, but a wicked 
" family novelette " countess could n't have ac- 
complished her ends better. She drove one man 
nearly wild with the pretty little treachery, and 
the other man abandoned her and came West to 
forget the trickery. 

Moon-face was that man. 

We rounded and limped over a low spur of hill, 
and came out upon a field of aching, snowy lime 
rolled in sheets, twisted into knots, riven with 
rents, and diamonds, and stars, stretching for more 
than half a mile in every direction. 

On this place of despair lay most of the big, bad 
geysers who know when there is trouble in Kra- 
katoa, who tell the pines when there is a cyclone 
on the Atlantic seaboard, and who are exhibited 
to visitors under pretty and fanciful names. 



The Yellowstone 79 

The first mound that I encountered belonged to 
a goblin who was splashing in his tub. 

I heard him kick, pull a shower-bath on his 
shoulders, gasp, crack his joints, and rub himself 
down with a towel j then he let the water out of 
the bath, as a thoughtful man should, and it all 
sunk down out of sight till another goblin arrived. 

So we looked and we wondered at the Beehive, 
whose mouth is built up exactly like a hive, at the 
Turban (which is not in the least like a turban), 
and at many, many other geysers, hot holes, and 
springs. Some of them rumbled, some hissed, 
some went ofF spasmodically, and others lay dead 
still in sheets of sapphire and beryl. 

Would you believe that even these terrible 
creatures have to be guarded by the troopers to 
prevent the irreverent Americans from chipping 
the cones to pieces, or, worse still, making the 
geyser sick ? If you take a small barrel full of 
soft-soap and drop it down a geyser's mouth, that 
geyser will presently be forced to lay all before 
you, and for days afterward will be of an irritated 
and inconstant stomach. 

When they told me the tale I was filled with 
sympathy. Now I wish that I had soft-soap and 
tried the experiment on some lonely little beast 



8o American Notes 

far away In the woods. It sounds so probable 
and so human. 

Yet he would be a bold man who would admin- 
ister emetics to the Giantess. She is flat-lipped, 
having no mouth ; she looks like a pool, fifty feet 
long and thirty wide, and there is no ornamentation 
about her. At irregular intervals she speaks and 
sends up a volume of water over two hundred feet 
high to begin with, then she is angry for a day 
and a half — sometimes for two days. 

Owing to her peculiarity of going mad in the 
night, not many people have seen the Giantess at 
her finest ; but the clamor of her unrest, men 
say, shakes the wooden hotel, and echoes like 
thunder among the hills. 

The congregation returned to the hotel to put 
down their impressions in diaries and note-books, 
which they wrote up ostentatiously in the verandas. 
It was a sweltering hot day, albeit we stood some- 
what higher than the level of Simla, and I left 
that raw pine creaking caravansary for the cool 
shade of a clump of pines between whose trunks 
glimmered tents. 

A batch of United States troopers came down 
the road and flung themselves across the country 
into their rough lines. The Melican cavalryman 



The Yellowstone 8i 

can ride, though he keeps his accoutrements pig- 
fashion and his horse cow-fashion. 

I was free of that camp in five minutes — free 
to play with the heavy, lumpy carbines, have the 
saddles stripped, and punch the horses knowingly 
in the ribs. One of the men had been in the 
fight with " Wrap-up-his-Tail," and he told me 
how that great chief, his horse's tail tied up in 
red calico, swaggered in front of the United States 
cavalry, challenging all to single combat. But 
he was slain, and a few of his tribe with him. 

" There 's no use in an Indian, anyway," con- 
cluded my friend. 

A couple of cow-boys — real cow-boys — 
jingled through the camp amid a shower of mild 
chafF. They were on their way to Cook City, I 
fancy, and I know that they never washed. But 
they were picturesque ruffians exceedingly, with 
long spurs, hooded stirrups, slouch hats, fur 
weather-cloth over their knees, and pistol-butts 
just easy to hand. 

" The cow-boy 's goln' under before long,'* 
said my friend. " Soon as the country 's settled 
up he '11 have to go. But he 's mighty useful 
now. What would we do without the cow-boy ? " 

" As how ? " said I, and the camp laughed. 

6 



82 American Notes 

" He has the money. We have the skill. He 
comes in winter to play poker at the military- 
posts. We play poker — a few. When he 's 
lost his money we make him drunk and let him 
go. Sometimes we get the wrong man." 

And he told me a tale of an innocent cow- 
boy who turned up, cleaned out, at an army post, 
and played poker for thirty-six hours. But it was 
the post that was cleaned out when that long- 
haired Caucasian removed himself, heavy with 
everybody's pay and declining the proffered liquor. 

" Noaw," said the historian, " I don't play with 
no cow-boy unless he 's a little bit drunk first." 

Ere I departed I gathered from more than one 
man the significant fact that up to one hundred 
yards he felt absolutely secure behind his revolver. 

" In England, I understand," quoth the limber 
youth from the South, — "in England a man isn't 
allowed to play with no fire-arms. He 's got to 
be taught all that when he enlists. I did n't want 
much teaching; how to shoot straicrht 'fore I served 
Uncle Sam. And that 's just where it is. But 
you was talking about your Horse Guards now ? " 

I explained briefly some peculiarities of equip- 
ment connected with our crackest crack cavalry. 
I grieve to say the camp roared. 



The Yellowstone 83 

" Take 'em over swampy ground. Let 'em 
run around a bit an' work the starch out of 'em, 
an' then, Almighty, if we would n't plug 'em at 
ease I 'd eat their horses." 

There was a maiden — a very little maiden — 
who had just stepped out of one of James's novels. 
She owned a delightful mother and an equally 
delightful father — a heavy-eyed, slow-voiced man 
of finance. The parents thought that their 
daughter wanted chancre. 

to & 

She lived in New Hampshire. Accordingly, 
she had dragged them up to Alaska and to the 
Yosemite Valley, and was now returning leisurely, 
via the Yellowstone, just in time for the tail-end 
of the summer season at Saratoga. 

We had met once or twice before in the park, 
and I had been amazed and amused at her critical 
commendation of the wonders that she saw. 
From that very resolute little mouth I received a 
lecture on American literature, the nature and 
inwardness of Washington society, the precise 
value of Cable's works as compared with Uncle 
Remus Harris, and a few other things that had 
nothing whatever to do with geysers, but were 
altogether pleasant. 

Now, an English maiden who had stumbled on 



84 American Notes 

a dust-grimed, lime-washed, sun-peeled, collarless 
wanderer come from and going to goodness knows 
where, would, her mother inciting her and her 
father brandishing his umbrella, have regarded him 
as a dissolute adventurer — a person to be dis- 
regarded. 

Not so those delightful people from New 
Hampshire. They were good enough to treat 
him — it sounds almost incredible — as a human 
being, possibly respectable, probably not in im- 
mediate need of financial assistance. 

Papa talked pleasantly and to the point. 

The little maiden strove valiantly with the 
accent of her birth and that of her rearing, and 
mamma smiled benignly in the background. 

Balance this with a story of a young English 
idiot I met mooning about inside his high collar, 
attended by a valet. He condescended to tell me 
that " you can't be too careful who you talk to 
in these parts." And stalked on, fearing, I 
suppose, every minute for his social chastity. 

That man was a barbarian (I took occasion to 
tell him so), for he comported himself after the 
manner of the head-hunters and hunted of Assam 
who are at perpetual feud one with another. 

You will understand that these foolish stories 



The Yellowstone 85 

are Introduced In order to cover the fact that this 
pen cannot describe the glories of the Upper 
Geyser Basin. The evening I spent under the 
lee of the Castle Geyser, sitting on a log with 
some troopers and watching a baronial keep forty 
feet high spouting hot water. If the Castle went 
off first, they said the Giantess would be quiet, 
and vice versa^ and then they told tales till the 
moon got up and a party of campers In the woods 
gave us all something to eat. 

Then came soft, turfy forest that deadened the 
wheels, and two troopers on detachment duty stole 
noiselessly behind us. One was the Wrap-up- 
hls-Tail man, and they talked merrily while the 
half-broken horses bucked about among the trees. 
And so a cavalry escort was with us for a mile, 
till we got to a mighty hill all strewn with moss 
agates, and everybody had to jump out and pant 
In that thin air. But how intoxicating It was ! 
The old lady from Chicago ducked like an eman- 
cipated hen as she scuttled about the road, cram- 
ming pieces of rock Into her reticule. She sent me 
fifty yards down to the hill-side to pick up a piece 
of broken bottle which she insisted was moss agate. 

" I Ve some o' that at home, an* they shine. 
Yes, you go get It, young man." 



86 American Notes 

As we climbed the long path the road grew 
viler and viler till it became, without disguise, the 
bed of a torrent ; and just when things were at 
their rockiest we nearly fell into a little sapphire 
lake — but never sapphire was so blue — called 
Mary's Lake; and that between eight and nine 
thousand feet above the sea. 

Afterward, grass downs, all on a vehement 
slope, so that the buggy, following the new-made 
road, ran on the two ofF=wheels mostly till we 
dipped head-first into a ford, climbed up a clifF, 
raced along down, dipped again, and pulled up di- 
shevelled at "Larry's" for lunch and an hour's rest. 

Then we lay on the grass and laughed with 
sheer bliss of being alive. This have I known 
once in Japan, once on the banks of the Colum- 
bia, what time the salmon came in and California 
howled, and once again in the Yellowstone by the 
light of the eyes of the maiden from New Hamp- 
shire. Four httle pools lay at my elbow, one was 
of black water (tepid), one clear water (cold), one 
clear water (hot), one red water (boiling). My 
newly washed handkerchief covered them all, and 
we two marvelled as children marvel. 

" This evening we shall do the Grand Canyon 
of the Yellowstone," said the maiden. 



The Yellowstone 87 

" Together ? " said I ; and she said, " Yes." 

The sun was beginning to sink when we heard 
the roar of falling waters and came to a broad 
river alono: whose banks we ran. And then — I 
might at a pinch describe the infernal regions, but 
not the other place. The Yellowstone River has 
occasion to run through a gorge about eight miles 
long. To get to the bottom of the gorge it makes 
two leaps, one of about one hundred and twenty and 
the other of three hundred feet. I investigated the 
upper or lesser fall, which is close to the hotel. 

Up to that time nothing particular happens to 
the Yellowstone — its banks being only rocky, 
rather steep, and plentifully adorned with pines. 

At the falls it comes round a corner, green, 
solid, ribbed with a little foam, and not more than 
thirty yards wide. Then it goes over, still green, 
and rather more solid than before. After a min- 
ute or two, you, sitting upon a rock directly above 
the drop, begin to understand that something has 
occurred; that the river has jumped between solid 
clifF walls, and that the gentle froth of water lap- 
ping the sides of the gorge below is really the 
outcome of great waves. 

And the river yells aloud ; but the cliffs do not 
allow the yells to escape. 



88 American Notes 

That inspection began with curiosity and 
finished in terror, for it seemed that the whole 
world was sliding in chrysolite from under my 
feet. I followed with the others round the corner 
to arrive at the brink of the canyon. We had to 
climb up a nearly perpendicular ascent to begin 
with, for the ground rises more than the river 
drops. Stately pine woods fringe either lip of the 
gorge, which is the gorge of the Yellowstone. 
You '11 find all about it in the guide books. 

All that I can say is that without warning or 
preparation I looked into a gulf seventeen hundred 
feet deep, with eagles and fish-hawks circling far 
below. And the sides of that gulf were one wild 
welter of color — crimson, emerald, cobalt, ochre, 
amber, honey splashed with port wine, snow white, 
vermilion, lemon, and silver gray in wide washes. 
The sides did not fall sheer, but were graven by 
time, and water, and air into monstrous heads of 
kings, dead chiefs — men and women of the old 
time. So far below that no sound of its strife 
could reach us, the Yellowstone River ran a finger- 
wide strip of jade green. 

The sunlight took those wondrous walls and 
gave fresh hues to those that nature had already 
laid there. 



The Yellowstone 89 

Evening crept through the pines that shadowed 
us, but the full glory of the day flamed in that 
canyon as we went out very cautiously to a jut- 
ting piece of rock — blood-red or pink it was — 
that overhung the deepest deeps of all. 

Now I know what it is to sit enthroned amid the 
clouds of sunset as the spirits sit in Blake's pictures. 
Giddiness took away all sensation of touch or 
form, but the sense of blinding color remained. 

When I reached the mainland again I had 
sworn that I had been floating. 

The maid from New Hampshire said no word for 
a very long time. Then she quoted poetry, which 
was perhaps the best thing she could have done. 

" And to think that this show-place has been 
going on all these days an' none of we ever saw 
it," said the old lady from Chicago, with an acid 
glance at her husband. 

"No, only the Injians," said he, unmoved ; and 
the maiden and I laughed. 

Inspiration is fleeting, beauty Is vain, and the 
power of the mind for wonder limited. Though 
the shining hosts themselves had risen choiring 
from the bottom of the gorge, they would not have 
prevented her papa and one baser than he from 
rolling stones down those stupendous rainbow- 



90 American Notes 

washed slides. Seventeen hundred feet of steep- 
est pitch and rather more than seventeen hundred 
colors for log or bowlder to whirl through ! 

So we heaved things and saw them gather way 
and bound from white rock to red or yellow, drag- 
ging behind them torrents of color, till the noise 
of their descent ceased and they bounded a hun- 
dred yards clear at the last into the Yellowstone. 

" I 've been down there," said Tom, that even- 
ing. " It 's easy to get do w^n if you 're careful — 
just sit an' slide ; but getting up is worse. An' I 
found down below there two stones just marked 
with a picture of the canyon. I would n't sell 
these rocks not for fifteen dollars." 

And papa and I crawled down to the Yellow- 
stone — just above the first little fall — to wet a 
line for good luck. The round moon came up 
and turned the clifFs and pines into silver; and a 
two-pound trout came up also, and we slew him 
among the rocks, nearly tumbling into that wild 
river. 

• • • • • • 

Then out and away to Livingstone once more. 
The maiden from New Hampshire disappeared, 
papa and mamma with her. Disappeared, too, the 
old lady from Chicago, and the others. 



Chicago 

?• 

<< I know thy cunning and thy greed. 
Thy hard high lust and wilful deed. 
And all thy glory loves to tell 
Of specious gifts material." 

I HAVE Struck a city — a real city — and they 
call it Chicago. 

The other places do not count. San Francisco 
was a pleasure-resort as well as a city, and Salt 
Lake was a phenomenon. 

This place is the first American city I have 
encountered. It holds rather more than a million 
of people with bodies, and stands on the same sort 
of soil as Calcutta. Having seen it, I urgently 
desire never to see it again. It is inhabited by 
savages. Its water is the water of the Hooghly, 
and its air is dirt. Also it says that it is the 
" boss " town of America. 



92 American Notes 

I do not believe that it has anything to do with 
this country. They told me to go to the Palmer 
House, which is overmuch gilded and mirrored, 
and there I found a huge hall of tessellated marble 
crammed with people talking about money, and 
spitting about everywhere. Other barbarians 
charged in and out of this inferno with letters 
and telegrams in their hands, and yet others 
shouted at each other. A man who had drunk 
quite as much as was good for him told me that 
this was " the finest hotel in the finest city on 
God Almighty's earth." By the way, v/hen an 
American wishes to indicate the next country or 
state, he says, "God A'mighty's earth." This 
prevents discussion and flatters his vanity. 

Then I went out into the streets, which are 
long and flat and without end. And verily it is 
not a good thing to live in the East for any length 
of time. Your ideas grow to clash with those 
held by every right-thinking man. I looked down 
interminable vistas flanked with nine, ten, and 
fifteen-storied houses, and crowded with men and 
women, and the show impressed me with a great 
horror. 

Except in London — and I have forgotten what 
London was Hke — I had never seen so many 



Chicago 93 

white people together, and never such a collection 
of miserables. There was no color in the street 
and no beauty — only a maze of wire ropes over- 
head and dirty stone flagging under foot. 

A cab-driver volunteered to show me the glory 
of the town for so much an hour, and with him I 
wandered far. He conceived that all this turmoil 
and squash was a thing to be reverently admired, 
that it was good to huddle men together in fifteen 
layers, one atop of the other, and to dig holes in 
the ground for offices. 

He said that Chicago was a live town, and that 
all the creatures hurrying by me were engaged in 
business. That is to say they were trying to 
make some money that they might not die through 
lack of food to put into their bellies. He took 
me to canals as black as ink, and filled with un- 
told abominations, and bid me watch the stream 
of traffic across the bridges. 

He then took me into a saloon, and while I 
drank made me note that the floor was covered 
with coins sunk in cement. A Hottentot would 
not have been guilty of this sort of barbarism. 
The coins made an effect pretty enough, but the 
man who put them there had no thought of beauty, 
and, therefore, he was a savage. 



94 American Notes 

Then my cab-driver showed me business blocks 
gay with signs and studded with fantastic and 
absurd advertisements of goods, and looking down 
the long street so adorned, it was as though each 
vender stood at his door howling : — 

" For the sake of money, employ or buy of 
me, and me only ! " 

Have you ever seen a crowd at a famine-relief 
distribution ? You know then how the men leap 
into the air, stretching out their arms above the 
crowd in the hope of being seen, while the women 
dolorously slap the stomachs of their children and 
whimper. I had sooner watch famine relief than 
the white man engaged in what he calls legitimate 
competition. The one I understand. The other 
makes me ill. 

And the cabman said that these things were 
the proof of progress, and by that I knew he had 
been reading his newspaper, as every intelligent 
American should. The papers tell their clientele 
in language fitted to their comprehension that the 
snarling together of telegraph-wires, the heaving 
up of houses, and the making of money is progress. 

I spent ten hours in that huge wilderness, wan- 
dering through scores of miles of these terrible 
streets and jostling some few hundred thousand of 



Chicago 95 

these terrible people who talked palsa bat through 
their noses. 

The cabman left me ; but after awhile I picked 
up another man, who was full of figures, and into 
my ears he poured them as occasion required or 
the big blank factories suggested. Here they 
turned out so many hundred thousand dollars' 
worth of such and such an article ; there so 
many million other things; this house was worth 
so many million dollars ; that one so many million, 
more or less. It was like listening to a child 
babbling of its hoard of shells. It was like watch- 
ing a fool playing with buttons. But I was 
expected to do more than listen or watch. He 
demanded that I should admire; and the utmost 
that I could say was : — 

" Are these things so ? Then I am very sorry 
for you.'* 

That made him angry, and he said that insular 
envy made me unresponsive. So, you see, I could 
not make him understand. 

About four and a half hours after Adam was 
turned out of the Garden of Eden he felt hungry, 
and so, bidding Eve take care that her head was 
not broken by the descending fruit, shinned up 
a cocoanut-palm. That hurt his legs, cut his 



96 American Notes 

breast, and made him breathe heavily, and Eve 
was tormented with fear lest her lord should miss 
his footing, and so bring the tragedy of this world 
to an end ere the curtain had fairly risen. Had I 
met Adam then, I should have been sorry for him. 
To-day I find eleven hundred thousand of his 
sons just as far advanced as their father in the 
art of getting food, and immeasurably inferior to 
him in that they think that their palm-trees lead 
straight to the skies. Consequently, I am sorry 
in rather more than a million different ways. 

In the East bread comes naturally, even to the 
poorest, by a little scratching or the gift of a friend 
not quite so poor. In less favored countries one 
is apt to forget. Then I went to bed. And that 
was on a Saturday night. 

Sunday brought me the queerest experiences of 
ail — a revelation of barbarism complete. I found 
a place that was officially described as a church. 
It was a circus really, but that the worshippers did 
not know. There were flowers all about the 
building, which was fitted up with plush and 
stained oak and much luxury, including twisted 
brass candlesticks of severest Gothic design. 

To these things and a congregation of savages 
entered suddenly a wonderful man, completely in 



Chicago 97 

the confidence of their God, whom he treated 
colloquially and exploited very much as a news- 
paper reporter would exploit a foreign potentate. 
But, unlike the newspaper reporter, he never 
allowed his listeners to forget that he, and not He, 
was the centre of attraction. With a voice of 
silver and with Imagery borrowed from the 
auction-room, he built up for his hearers a 
heaven on the lines of the Palmer House (but 
with all the gilding real gold, and all the plate- 
glass diamond), and set in the centre of It a loud- 
voiced, argumentative, very shrewd creation that 
he called God. One sentence at this point caught 
my delighted ear. It was apropos of some ques- 
tion of the Judgment, and ran : — 

"No ! I tell you God does n't do business that 
way." 

He was giving them a deity whom they could 
comprehend, and a gold and jewelled heaven In 
which they could take a natural Interest. He In- 
terlarded his performance with the slang of the 
streets, the counter, and the exchange, and he said 
that religion ought to enter into daily life. Con- 
sequently, I presume he Introduced It as daily life 
— his own and the life of his friends. 

Then I escaped before the blessing, desiring no 

7 



98 American Notes 

benediction at such hands. But the persons who 
listened seemed to enjoy themselves, and I under- 
stood that I had met with a popular preacher. 

Later on, when I had perused the sermons of 
a gentleman called Talmage and some others, I 
perceived that I had been listening to a very mild 
specimen. Yet that man, with his brutal gold 
and silver idols, his hands-in-pocket, cigar-in- 
mouth, and hat-on-the-back-of-the-head style of 
dealing with the sacred vessels, would count him- 
self, spiritually, quite competent to send a mission 
to convert the Indians. 

All that Sunday I listened to people who said 
that the mere fact of spiking down strips of iron 
to wood, and getting a steam and iron thing to 
run along them was progress, that the telephone 
was progress, and the net-work of wires overhead 
was progress. They repeated their statements 
again and again. 

One of them took me to their City Hall and 
Board of Trade works, and pointed it out with 
pride. It was very ugly, but very big, and the 
streets in front of it were narrow and unclean. 
When I saw the faces of the men who did busi- 
ness in that building, I felt that there had been a 
mistake in their billeting. 



Chicago 99 

By the way, 't is a consolation to feel that I am 
not writing to an English audience. Then I 
should have to fall into feigned ecstasies over the 
marvellous progress of Chicago since the days of 
the great fire, to allude casually to the raising of 
the entire city so many feet above the level of the 
lake which it faces, and generally to grovel before 
the golden calf. But you, who are desperately 
poor, and therefore by these standards of no ac- 
count, know things, will understand when I write 
that they have managed to get a million of men 
together on flat land, and that the bulk of these 
men together appear to be lower than Mahajans 
and not so companionable as a Punjabi Jat after 
harvest. 

But I don't think it was the blind hurry of the 
people, their argot^ and their grand ignorance of 
. things beyond their immediate interests that dis- 
pleased me so much as a study of the daily papers 
of Chicago. 

Imprimis^ there was some sort of a dispute 
between New York and Chicago as to which 
town should give an exhibition of products to be 
hereafter holden, and through the medium of their 
more dignified journals the two cities were ya- 
hooing and hi-yi-ing at each other like opposition 



loo American Notes 

newsboys. They called it humor, but it sounded 
like something quite different. 

That was only the first trouble. The second 
lay in the tone of the productions. Leading 
articles which include gems such as " Back of 
such and such a place," or, " We noticed, Tues- 
day, such an event," or, " don't " for " does not," 
are things to be accepted with thankfulness. All 
that made me want to cry was that in these papers 
were faithfully reproduced all the war-cries and 
"back-talk" of the Palmer House bar, the slang 
of the barber-shops, the mental elevation and in- 
tegrity of the Pullman car porter, the dignity of 
the dime museum, and the accuracy of the excited 
fish-wife. I am sternly forbidden to believe that 
the paper educates the public. Then I am com- 
pelled to believe that the public educate the paper ; 
yet suicides on the press are rare. 

Just when the sense of unreality and oppression 
was strongest upon me, and when I most wanted 
help, a man sat at my side and began to talk what 
he called politics. 

I had chanced to pay about six shillings for a 
travelling-cap worth eighteen-pence, and he made 
of the fact a text for a sermon. He said that this 
was a rich country, and that the people liked to 



Chicago . loi 

pay two hundred per cent, on the value of a thing. 
They could afFord it. He said that the govern- 
ment imposed a protective duty of from ten to 
seventy per cent on foreign-made articles, and that 
the American manufacturer consequently could 
sell his goods for a healthy sum. Thus an im- 
ported hat would, with duty, cost two guineas. 
The American manufacturer would make a hat 
for seventeen shillings, and sell it for one pound 
fifteen. In these things, he said, lay the greatness 
of America and the effeteness of England. Com- 
petition between factory and factory kept the 
prices down to decent limits, but I was never to 
forget that this people were a rich people, not like 
the pauper Continentals, and that they enjoyed 
paying duties. 

To my weak intellect this seemed rather like 
juggling with counters. Everything that I have 
yet purchased costs about twice as much as it 
would in England, and when native made is of 
inferior quality. 

Moreover, since these lines were first thought 
of, I have visited a gentleman who owned a 
factory which used to produce things. He owned 
the factory still. Not a man was in it, but he 
was drawing a handsome income from a syndicate 



I02 American Notes 

of firms for keeping it closed, in order that it might 
not produce things. This man said that if pro- 
tection were abandoned, a tide of pauper labor 
would flood the country, and as I looked at his 
factory I thought how entirely better it was to 
have no labor of any kind whatever rather than 
face so horrible a future. 

Meantime, do you remember that this peculiar 
country enjoys paying money for value not re- 
ceived ? I am an alien, and for the life of me I 
cannot see why six shillings should be paid for 
eighteen-penny caps, or eight shillings for half- 
crown cigar-cases. When the country fills up to 
a decently populated level a few million people 
who are not aliens will be smitten with the same 
sort of blindness. 

But my friend's assertion somehow thoroughly 
suited the grotesque ferocity of Chicago. 

See now and judge ! In the village of Isser 
Jang, on the road to Montgomery, there be four 
Changar women who winnow corn — some seventy 
bushels a year. Beyond their hut lives Purun 
Dass, the money-lender, who on good security 
lends as much as five thousand rupees in a year. 
Jowala Singh, the smith, mends the village plows 
— some thirty, broken at the share, in three hun- 



Chicago 103 

dred and sixty-five days ; and Hukm Chund, who 
is letter-writer and head of the little club under 
the travellers' tree, generally keeps the village 
posted in such gossip as the barber and the mid- 
wife have not yet made public property. 

Chicago husks and winnows her wheat by the 
million bushels, a hundred banks lend hundreds of 
millions of dollars in the year, and scores of facto- 
ries turn out plow-gear and machinery by steam. 
Scores of daily papers do work which Hukm 
Chund and the barber and the midwife perform, 
with due regard for public opinion, in the village 
of Isser Jang. So far as manufactories go, the 
difference between Chicago on the lake, and Isser 
Jang on the Montgomery road, is one of degree 
only, and not of kind. As far as the understanding 
of the uses of life goes, Isser Jang, for all its sea- 
sonal cholers, has the advantage over Chicago. 

Jowala Singh knows and takes care to avoid the 
three or four ghoul-haunted fields on the outskirts 
of the village ; but he is not urged by millions of 
devils to run about all day in the sun and swear 
that his plowshares are the best in the Punjab ; 
nor does Purun Dass fly forth in an ekka more 
than once or twice a year, and he knows, on a 
pinch, how to use the railway and the telegraph as 



I04 American Notes 

well as any son of Israel in Chicago. But this is 
absurd. 

The East is not the West, and these men must 
continue to deal with the machinery of life, and to 
call it progress. Their very preachers dare not re- 
buke them. They gloss over the hunting for money 
and the thrice-sharpened bitterness of Adam's curse, 
by saying that such things dower a man with a 
larger range of thoughts and higher aspirations. 
They do not say, " Free yourselves from your own 
slavery," but rather, " If you can possibly manage 
it, do not set quite so much store on the things of 
this world." 

And they do not know what the things of this 
world are ! 

I went off to see cattle killed, by way of clearing 
my head, which, as you will perceive, was getting 
muddled. They say every Englishman goes to the 
Chicago stock-yards. You shall find them about 
six miles from the city ; and once having seen 
them, you will never forget the sight. 

As far as the eye can reach stretches a town- 
ship of cattle-pens, cunningly divided into blocks, 
so that the animals of any pen can be speedily 
driven out close to an inclined timber path which 
leads to an elevated covered way straddling 



Chicago 105 

high above the pens. These viaducts are two- 
storied. On the upper story tramp the doomed 
cattle, stolidly for the most part. On the lower, 
with a scuffling of sharp hoofs and multitudinous 
yells, run the pigs, the same end being appointed 
for each. Thus you will see the gangs of cattle 
waiting their turn — as they wait sometimes for 
days ; and they need not be distressed by the sight 
of their fellows running about in the fear of death. 
All they know Is that a man on horseback causes 
their next-door neighbors to move by means of a 
whip. Certain bars and fences are unshipped, and 
behold ! that crowd have gone up the mouth of a 
sloping tunnel and return no more. 

It is different with the pigs. They shriek back 
the news of the exodus to their friends, and a 
hundred pens skirl responsive. 

It was to the pigs I first addressed myself. 
Selecting a viaduct which was full of them, as I 
could hear, though I could not see, I marked a 
sombre building whereto it ran, and went there, 
not unalarmed by stray cattle who had managed to 
escape from their proper quarters. A pleasant 
smell of brine warned me of what was coming. 
I entered the factory and found it full of pork in 
barrels, and on another story more pork un- 



io6 American Notes 

barrelled, and in a huge room the halves of swine, 
for whose behoof great lumps of ice were being 
pitched in at the window. That room was the 
mortuary chamber where the pigs lay for a little 
while in state ere they began their progress through 
such passages as kings may sometimes travel. 

Turning a corner, and not noting an overhead 
arrangement of greased rail, wheel, and pulley, I 
ran into the arms of four eviscerated carcasses, all 
pure white and of a human aspect, pushed by a 
man clad in vehement red. When I leaped aside, 
the floor was slippery under me. Also there was 
a flavor of farm-yard in my nostrils and the shout- 
ing of a multitude in my ears. But there was no 
joy in that shouting. Twelve men stood in two 
lines six a side. Between them and overhead ran 
the railway of death that had nearly shunted me 
through the window. Each man carried a knife, 
the sleeves of his shirt were cut off at the elbows, 
and from bosom to heel he was blood-red. 

Beyond this perspective was a column of steam, 
and beyond that was where I worked my awe- 
struck way, unwilling to touch beam or wall. 
The atmosphere was stifling as a night in the 
rains by reason of the steam and the crowd. I 
climbed to the beginning of things and, perched 



Chicago 1 07 

upon a narrow beam, overlooked very nearly all 
the pigs ever bred in Wisconsin. They had just 
been shot out of the mouth of the viaduct and 
huddled together in a large pen. Thence they 
were flicked persuasively, a few at a time, into a 
smaller chamber, and there a man fixed tackle on 
their hinder legs, so that they rose in the air, sus- 
pended from the railway of death. 

Oh ! it was then they shrieked and called on 
their mothers, and made promises of amendment, 
till the tackle-man punted them in their backs and 
they slid head down into a brick-floored passage, 
very like a big kitchen sink, that was blood-red. 
There awaited them a red man with a knife, 
which he passed jauntily through their throats, 
and the full-voiced shriek became a splutter, and 
then a fall as of heavy tropical rain, and the red 
man, who was backed against the passage-wall, 
you will understand, stood clear of the wildly 
kicking hoofs and passed his hand over his eyes, 
not from any feeling of compassion, but because 
the spurted blood was in his eyes, and he had 
barely time to stick the next arrival. Then that 
first stuck swine dropped, still kicking, into a great 
vat of boiling water, and spoke no more words, 
but wallowed in obedience to some unseen ma- 



io8 American Notes 

chinery, and presently came forth at the lower end 
of the vat, and was heaved on the blades of a 
blunt paddle-wheel, things which said " Hough, 
hough, hough ! " and skelped all the hair off him, 
except what little a couple of men with knives 
could remove. 

Then he was again hitched by the heels to that 
said railway, and passed down the line of the 
twelve men, each man with a knife — losing with 
each man a certain amount of his individuality, 
which was taken away in a wheel-barrow, and 
when he reached the last man he was very beauti- 
ful to behold, but excessively unstuffed and limp. 
Preponderance of individuality was ever a bar to 
foreign travel. That pig could have been in case 
to visit you in India had he not parted with some 
of his most cherished notions. 

The dissecting part impressed me not so much 
as the slaying. They were so excessively alive, 
these pigs. And then, they were so excessively 
dead, and the man in the dripping, clammy, hot 
passage did not seem to care, and ere the blood of 
such a one had ceased to foam on the floor, such 
another and four friends with him had shrieked and 
died. But a pig is only the unclean animal — the 
forbidden of the prophet. 



VI 

The American Army 

?• 

SHOULD very much like to deliver a dis- 
sertation on the American army and the 
possibilities of its extension. You see, it is such 
a beautiful little army, and the dear people don't 
quite understand what to do with it. The theory 
is that it is an instructional nucleus round which 
the militia of the country will rally, and from 
which they will get a stiffening in time of danger. 
Yet other people consider that the army should 
be built, like a pair of lazy tongs — on the prin- 
ciple of elasticity and extension — so that in time 
of need it may fill up its skeleton battalions and 
empty saddle troops. This is real wisdom, be- 
cause the American army, as at present consti- 
tuted, is made up of: — 

Twenty-five regiments infantry, ten companies 
each. 

Ten regiments cavalry, twelve companies each. 



no American Notes 

Five regiments artillery, twelve companies each. 

Now there is a notion in the air to reorganize 
the service on these lines : — 

Eighteen regiments infantry at four battalions, 
four companies each ; third battalion, skeleton ; 
fourth on paper. 

Eight regiments cavalry at four battalions, four 
troops each ; third battalion, skeleton ; fourth on 
paper. 

Five regiments artillery at four battalions, four 
companies each ; third battalion, skeleton ; fourth 
on paper. 

Observe the beauty of this business. The third 
battalion will have its officers, but no men ; the 
fourth will probably have a rendezvous and some 
equipment. 

It is not contemplated to give it anything more 
definite at present. Assuming the regiments to be 
made up to full complement, we get an army of 
fifty thousand men, which after the need passes 
away must be cut down fifty per cent, to the 
huge delight of the officers. 

The military needs of the States be three : (a) 
Frontier warfare, an employment well within the 
grip of the present army of twenty-five thousand, 
and in the nature of things growing less arduous 



The American Army 1 1 1 

year by year; (b) internal riots and commotions 
which rise up Hke a dust devil, whirl furiously, 
and die out long before the authorities at Wash- 
ington could begin to fill up even the third skeleton 
battalions, much less hunt about for material for 
the fourth ; (c) civil war, in which, as the case 
in the affair of the North and South, the regular 
army would be swamped in the mass of militia 
and armed volunteers that would turn the land 
into a hell. 

Yet the authorities persist in regarding an ex- 
ternal war as a thing to be seriously considered. 

The Power that would disembark troops on 
American soil would be capable of heaving a 
shovelful of mud into the Atlantic in the hope of 
filling it up. Consequently, the authorities are 
fascinated with the idea of the sliding scale or 
concertina army. This is an hereditary instinct, 
for you know that when we English have got 
together two companies, one machine gun, a sick 
bullock, forty generals, and a mass of W. O. 
forms, we say we possess " an army corps capable 
of indefinite extension." 

The American army is a beautiful little army. 
Some day, when all the Indians are happily dead 
or drunk, it ought to make the finest scientific 



112 American Notes 

and survey corps that the world has ever seen; it 
does excellent work now, but there is this defect 
in its nature : It is officered, as you know, from 
West Point. 

The mischief of it is that West Point seems 
to be created for the purpose of spreading a gen- 
eral knowledge of military matters among the 
people. A boy goes up to that institution, gets 
his pass, and returns to civil life, so they tell me, 
with a dangerous knowledge that he is a suckling 
Von Moltke, and may apply his learning when 
occasion offers. Given trouble, that man will 
be a nuisance, because he is a hideously versatile 
American, to begin with, as cock-sure of himself 
as a man can be, and with all the racial disregard 
for human life to back him, through any demi- 
semi-professional generalship. 

In a country where, as the records of the daily 
papers show, men engaged in a conflict with 
police or jails are all too ready to adopt a military 
formation and get heavily shot in a sort of cheap, 
half-constructed warfare, instead of being decently 
scared by the appearance of the military, this sort 
of arrangement does not seem wise. 

The bond between the States is of an amazing 
tenuity. So long as they do not absolutely march 



The American Army 113 

into the District of Columbia, sit on the Washing- 
ton statues, and invent a flag of their own, they 
can legislate, lynch, hunt negroes through swamps, 
divorce, railroad, and rampage as much as ever 
they choose. They do not need knowledge of 
their own military strength to back their genial 
lawlessness. 

That regular army, which is a dear little army, 
should be kept to itself, blooded on detachment 
duty, turned into the paths of science, and now 
and again assembled at feasts of Free Masons, and 
so forth. 

It is too tiny to be a political power. The 
immortal wreck of the Grand Army of the Repub- 
lic is a political power of the largest and most 
unblushing description. It ought not to help to 
lay the foundations of an amateur military power 
that is blind and irresponsible. 

By great good luck the evil-minded train, 
already delayed twelve hours by a burned bridge, 
brought me to the city on a Saturday by way of 
that valley which the Mormons, over their efforts, 
had caused to blossom like the rose. Twelve 
hours previously I had entered into a new world 
where, in conversation, every one was either a 
Mormon or a Gentile. It is not seemly for 

8 



114 American Notes 

a free and independent citizen to dub himself a 
Gentile, but the Mayor of Ogden — which is the 
Gentile city of the valley — told me that there 
must be some distinction between the two flocks. 

Long before the fruit orchards of Logan or 
the shining levels of the Salt Lake had been 
reached, that mayor — himself a Gentile, and one 
renowned for his dealings with the Mormons — 
told me that the great question of the existence of 
the power within the power was being gradually 
solved by the ballot and by education. 

All the beauty of the valley could not make 
me forget it. And the valley is very fair. Bench 
after bench of land, flat as a table against the 
flanks of the ringing hills, marks where the Salt 
Lake rested for awhile in its collapse from an 
inland sea to a lake fifty miles long and thirty 
broad. 

There are the makings of a very fine creed 
about Mormonism. To begin with, the Church 
is rather more absolute than that of Rome. Drop 
the polygamy plank in the platform, but on the 
other hand deal lightly with certain forms of 
excess ; keep the quality of the recruit down to 
the low mental level, and see that the best of all 
the agricultural science available is in the hands 



The American Army 1 1 5 

of the elders, and there you have a first-class 
engine for pioneer work. The tawdry mysticism 
and the borrowing from Freemasonry serve the 
low caste Swede and Dane, the Welshman and 
the Cornish cotter, just as well as a highly organ- 
ized heaven. 

Then I went about the streets and peeped into 
people's front windows, and the decorations upon 
the tables were after the manner of the year 1850. 
Main Street was full of country folk from the 
desert, come in to trade with the Zion Mercantile 
Co-operative Institute. The Church, I fancy, 
looks after the finances of this thing, and it con- 
sequently pays good dividends. 

The faces of the women were not lovely. In- 
deed, but for the certainty that ugly persons are 
just as irrational in the matter of undivided love 
as the beautiful, it seems that polygamy was a 
blessed institution for the women, and that only 
the dread threats of the spiritual power could drive 
the hulking, board-faced men into it. The women 
wore hideous garments, and the men appeared to 
be tied up with strings. 

They would market all that afternoon, and on 
Sunday go to the praying-place. I tried to talk 
to a few of them, but they spoke strange tongues, 



ii6 American Notes 

and stared and behaved like cows. Yet one 
woman, and not an altogether ugly one, confided 
to me that she hated the idea of Salt Lake City 
being turned into a show-place for the amusement 
of the Gentiles. 

"If we 'ave our own institutions, that ain't no 
reason why people should come 'ere and stare at 
us, his it ? " 

The dropped " h " betrayed her. 

" And when did you leave England ? " I said. 

" Summer of '84. I am Dorset," she said. 
" The Mormon agent was very good to us, and 
we was very poor. Now we 're better off — my 
father, an' mother, an' me." 

" Then you like the State ? " 

She misunderstood at first. 

" Oh, I ain't livin' in the state of polygamy. 
Not me, yet. I ain't married. I like where I 
am. I 've got things o' my own — and some 
land." 

"But I suppose you will — " 

" Not me. I ain't like them Swedes an* 
Danes. I ain't got nothin' to say for or against 
polygamy. It 's the elders' business, an' between 
you an' me, I don't think it 's going on much 
longer. You '11 'ear them in the 'ouse to-morrer 



The American Army 1 1 7 

talkin' as if it was spreadin' all over America. 
The Swedes, they think it his. 1 know it 
his n't.'' 

" But you 've got your land all right ? " 

"Oh, yes; we've got our land, an' we never 
say aught against polygamy, o' course — father, 
an' mother, an' me." 

On a table-land overlooking all the city stands 
the United States garrison of infantry and artillery. 
The State of Utah can do nearly anything it 
pleases until that much-to-be-desired hour when 
the Gentile vote shall quietly swamp out Mor- 
monism ; but the garrison is kept there in case of 
accidents. The big, shark-mouthed, pig-eared, 
heavy-boned farmers sometimes take to their creed 
with wildest fanaticism, and in past years have 
made life excessively unpleasant for the Gentile 
when he was few in the land. But to-day, so far 
from killing openly or secretly, or burning Gen- 
tile farms, it is all the Mormon dare do to feebly 
try to boycott the interloper. His journals preach 
defiance to the United States Government, and in 
the Tabernacle on a Sunday the preachers follow 
suit. 

When I went there, the place was full of people 
who would have been much better for a washing. 



1 1 8 American Notes 

A man rose up and told them that they were the 
chosen of God, the elect of Israel ; that they were 
to obey their priests, and that there was a good 
time coming. I fancy that they had heard all this 
before so many times it produced no impression 
whatever, even as the sublimest mysteries of 
another faith lose salt through constant iteration. 
They breathed heavily through their noses, and 
stared straight in front of them — impassive as 
flat fish. 



VII 

America's Defenceless Coasts 



JUST suppose that America were twenty days 
distant from England. Then a man could 
study its customs with undivided soul ; but being 
so very near next door, he goes about the land 
with one eye on the smoke of the flesh-pots of 
the old country across the seas, while with the 
other he squints biliously and prejudicially at the 
alien. 

I can lay my hand upon my sacred heart and 
affirm that up to to-day I have never taken three 
consecutive trips by rail without being delayed by 
an accident. That it was an accident to another 
train makes no difference. My own turn may 
come next. 

A few miles from peaceful, pleasure-loving 
Lakewood they had managed to upset an express 
goods train to the detriment of the flimsy perma- 
nent way; and thus the train which should have 



I20 American Notes 

left at three departed at seven in the evening. I 
was not angry. I vv^as scarcely even interested. 
When an American train starts on time I begin 
to anticipate disaster — a visitation for such good 
luck, you understand. 

Buffalo is a large village of a quarter of a 
million inhabitants, situated on the seashore, which 
is falsely called Lake Erie. It is a peaceful place, 
and more like an English county town than most 
of its friends. 

Once clear of the main business streets, you 
launch upon miles and miles of asphalted roads 
running between cottages and cut-stone residences 
of those who have money and peace. All the 
Eastern cities own this fringe of elegance, but 
except in Chicago nowhere is the fringe deeper 
or more heavily widened than in Buffalo. 

The American will go to a bad place because 
he cannot speak English, and is proud of it ; 
but he knows how to make a home for himself 
and his mate, knows how to keep the grass green 
in front of his veranda, and how to fullest use the 
mechanism of life — hot water, gas, good bell- 
ropes, telephones, etc. His shops sell him delight- 
ful household fitments at very moderate rates, and 
he is encompassed with all manner of labor-saving 



America's Defenceless Coasts 121 

appliances. This does not prevent his wife and 
his daughter working themselves to death over 
household drudgery •, but the intention is good. 

When you have seen the outside of a few 
hundred thousand of these homes and the insides 
of a few score, you begin to understand why the 
American (the respectable one) does not take a 
deep interest in what they call " politics," and 
why he is so vaguely and generally proud of the 
country that enables him to be so comfortable. 
How can the owner of a dainty chalet, with 
smoked-oak furniture, imitation Venetian tapestry 
curtains, hot and cold water laid on, a bed of 
geraniums and hollyhocks, a baby crawling down 
the veranda, and a self-acting twirly-whirly hose 
gently hissing over the grass in the balmy dusk 
of an August evening — how can such a man 
despair of the Republic, or descend into the 
streets on voting days and mix cheerfully with 
"the boys"? 

No, it is the stranger — the homeless jackal of 
a stranger — whose interest in the country is 
limited to his hotel-bill and a railway-ticket, that 
can run from Dan to Beersheba, crying : — 

" All is barren ! " 

Every good American wants a home — a pretty 



122 American Notes 

house and a little piece of land of his very own ; 
and every other good American seems to get it. 

It was when my gigantic intellect was grappling 
with this question that I confirmed a discovery 
half made in the West. The natives of most 
classes marry young — absurdly young. One of 
my informants — not the twenty-two-year-old 
husband I met on Lake Chautauqua — said that 
from twenty to twenty-four was about the usual 
time for this folly. And when I asked whether 
the practice was confined to the constitutionally 
improvident classes, he said " No " very quickly. 
He said it was a general custom, and nobody saw 
anything wrong with it. 

" I guess, perhaps, very early marriage may 
account for a good deal of the divorce," said he, 
reflectively. 

Whereat I was silent. Their marriages and 
their divorces only concern these people ; and 
neither I travelling, nor you, who may come after, 
have any right to make rude remarks about them. 
Only — only coming from a land where a man 
begins to lightly turn to thoughts of love not 
before he is thirty, I own that playing at house- 
keeping before that age rather surprised me. Out 
in the West, though, they marry, boys and girls, 



America's Defenceless Coasts 123 

from sixteen upward, and I have met more than 
one bride of fifteen — husband aged twenty. 

" When man and woman are agreed, what can 
the KazI do ? " 

From those peaceful homes, and the envy they 
inspire (two trunks and a walking-stick and a bit 
of pine forest in British Columbia are not satis- 
factory, any way you look at them), I turned me 
to the lake front of Buffalo, where the steamers 
bellow to the grain elevators, and the locomotives 
yell to the coal-shutes, and the canal barges jostle 
the lumber-raft half a mile long as it snakes across 
the water in tow of a launch, and earth, and sky, 
and sea alike are thick with smoke. 

In the old days, before the railway ran into the 
city, all the business quarters fringed the lake- 
shore where the traffic was largest. To-day the 
business quarters have gone up-town to meet the 
railroad; the lake traffic still exists, but you shall 
find a narrow belt of red-brick desolation, broken 
windows, gap-toothed doors, and streets where the 
grass grows between the crowded wharves and the 
bustling city. To the lake front comes wheat 
from Chicago, lumber, coal, and ore, and a large 
trade in cheap excursionists. 

It was my felicity to catch a grain steamer and 



I 24 American Notes 

an elevator emptying that same steamer. The 
steamer might have been two thousand tons 
burden. She w^as laden v^^ith wheat in bulk j 
from stem to stern, thirteen feet deep, lay the 
clean, red wheat. There was no twenty-five per 
cent dirt admixture about it at all. It was 
wheat, fit for the grindstones as it lay. They 
manoeuvred the fore-hatch of that steamer directly 
under an elevator — a house of red tin a hundred 
and fifty feet high. Then they let down into that 
fore-hatch a trunk as if it had been the trunk of 
an elephant, but stiff, because it was a pipe of 
iron-champed wood. And the trunk had a steel- 
shod nose to it, and contained an endless chain 
of steel buckets. 

Then the captain swore, raising his eyes to 
heaven, and a gruff voice answered him from the 
place he swore at, and certain machinery, also in 
the firmament, began to clack, and the glittering, 
steel-shod nose of that trunk burrowed into the 
wheat, and the wheat quivered and sunk upon the 
instant as water sinks when the siphon sucks, 
because the steel buckets within the trunk were 
flying upon their endless round, carrying away 
each its appointed morsel of wheat. 

The elevator was a Persian well wheel — a 



Americans Defenceless Coasts 125 

wheel squashed out thin and cased in a pipe, a 
wheel driven not by bullocks, but by much horse- 
power, licking up the grain at the rate of thou-, 
sands of bushels the hour. And the wheat sunk 
into the fore-hatch while a man looked — sunk 
till the brown timbers of the bulkheads showed 
bare, and men leaped down through clouds of 
golden dust and shovelled the wheat furiously 
round the nose of the trunk, and got a steam- 
shovel of glittering steel and made that shovel 
also, till there remained of the grain not more 
than a horse leaves in the fold of his nose-bag. 

In this manner do they handle wheat at Buffalo. 
On one side of the elevator is the steamer, on the 
other the railway track ; and the wheat is loaded 
into the cars in bulk. Wah ! wah ! God is great, 
and I do not think He ever intended Gar Sahai 
or Luckman Narain to supply England with her 
wheat. India can cut in not without profit to 
herself when her harvest is good and the Ameri- 
can yield poor; but this very big country can, 
upon the average, supply the earth with all the 
beef and bread that is required. 

A man in the train said to me : — 

" We kin feed all the earth, jest as easily as we 
kin whip all the earth." 



I 26 American Notes 

Now the second statement is as false as the first 
is true. One of these days the respectable Re- 
public will find this out. 

Unfortunately we, the English, will never be 
the people to teach her ; because she is a char- 
tered libertine allowed to say and do anything she 
likes, from demanding the head of the empress in 
an editorial waste-basket, to chevying Canadian 
schooners up and down the Alaska Seas. It is 
perfectly impossible to go to war with these people, 
whatever they may do. 

They are much too nice, in the first place, and 
in the second, it would throw out all the passenger 
traffic of the Atlantic, and upset the financial 
arrangements of the English syndicates who have 
invested their money in breweries, railways, and 
the like, and in the third, it 's not to be done. 
Everybody knows that, and no one better than 
the American. 

Yet there are other powers who are not " ohai 
band " (of the brotherhood) — China, for instance. 
Try to believe an irresponsible writer when he 
assures you that China's fleet to-day, if properly 
manned, could waft the entire American navy out 
of the water and into the blue. The big, fat 
Republic that is afraid of nothing, because nothing 



America's Defenceless Coasts 1 27 

up to the present date has happened to make her 
afraid, is as unprotected as a jelly-fish. Not 
internally, of course — it would be madness for 
any Power to throw men into America ; they 
would die — but as far as regards coast defence. 

From five miles out at sea (I have seen a test 
of her " fortified " ports) a ship of the power of 
H. M. S. " Collingwood " (they have n't run her 
on a rock yet) would wipe out any or every town 
from San Francisco to Long Branch ; and three 
first-class ironclads would account for New York, 
Bartholdi's Statue and all. 

Reflect on this. 'T would be " Pay up or go 
up" round the entire coast of the United 
States. To this furiously answers the patriotic 
American : — 

"We should not pay. We should Invent a 
Columbiad in Pittsburg or — or anywhere else, and 
blow any outsider into h — 1." 

They might invent. They might lay waste 
their cities and retire inland, for they can subsist 
entirely on their own produce. Meantime, in a 
war waged the only way it could be waged by an 
unscrupulous Power, their coast cities and their 
dock-yards would be ashes. They could construct 
their navy inland if they liked, but you could never 



128 American Notes 

bring a ship down to the water-ways, as they 
stand now. 

They could not, with an ordinary water patrol, 
despatch one regiment of men six miles across the 
seas. There would be about five million exces- 
sively angry, armed men pent up within American 
limits. These men would require ships to get 
themselves afloat. The country has no such 
ships, and until the ships were built New York 
need not be allowed a single-wheeled carriage 
within her limits. 

Behold now the glorious condition of this Re- 
public which has no fear. There is ransom and 
loot past the counting of man on her seaboard 
alone — plunder that would enrich a nation — and 
she has neither a navy nor half a dozen first-class 
ports to guard the whole. No man catches a 
snake by the tail, because the creature will sting ; 
but you can build a fire around a snake that will 
make it squirm. 

The country is supposed to be building a navy 
now. When the ships are completed her alliance 
will be worth having — if the alliance of any 
republic can be relied upon. For the next three 
years she can be hurt, and badly hurt. Pity it is 
that she is of our own blood, looking at the matter 



America's Defenceless Coasts 129 

from a Pindarris point of view. Dog cannot eat 

dog. 

These sinful reflections were prompted by the 
sight of the beautifully unprotected condition of 
Buffalo — a city that could be made to pay up 
five million dollars without feeling it. There are 
her companies of infantry in a sort of port there. 
A gun-boat brought over in pieces from Niagara 
could get the money and get away before she could 
be caught, while an unarmored gun-boat guarding 
Toronto could ravage the towns on the lakes. 
When one hears so much of the nation that can 
whip the earth, it is, to say the least of it, surpris- 
ing to find her so temptingly spankable. 

The average American citizen seems to have a 
notion that any Power engaged in strife with the 
Star Spangled Banner will disembark men from 
flat-bottomed boats on a convenient beach for the 
purpose of being shot down by local militia. In 
his own simple phraseology : — 

" Not by a darned sight. No, sir." 

Ransom at long range will be about the size of 
it — cash or crash. 

Let us revisit calmer scenes. 

In the heart of Buffalo there stands a magnificent 
building which the population do innocently style 

9 



130 American Notes 

a music-hall. Everybody comes here of evenings 
to sit around little tables and listen to a first-class 
orchestra. The place is something like the Gaiety 
Theatre at Simla, enlarged twenty times. The 
" Light Brigade '* of Buffalo occupy the boxes 
and the stage, " as it was at Simla in the days of 
old," and the others sit in the parquet. Here I 
went with a friend — poor or boor is the man who 
cannot pick up a friend for a season in America — 
and here was shown the really smart folk of the 
city. I grieve to say I laughed, because when an 
American wishes to be correct he sets himself to 
imitate the Englishman. This he does vilely, and 
earns not only the contempt of his brethren, but 
the amused scorn of the Briton. 

I saw one man who was pointed out to me as 
being the glass of fashion hereabouts. He was 
aggressively English in his get-up. From eye- 
glass to trouser-hem the illusion was perfect, but 
— he wore with evening-dress buttoned boots 
with brown cloth tops ! Not till I wandered 
about this land did I understand why the comic 
papers belabor the Anglomaniac. 

Certain young men of the more idiotic sort 
launch into dog-carts and raiment of English cut, 
and here in Buffalo they play polo at four in the 



America's Defenceless Coasts 131 

afternoon. I saw three youths come down to the 
polo-ground faultlessly attired for the game and 
mounted on their best ponies. Expecting a game, 
I lingered ; but I was mistaken. These three 
shining ones with the very new yellow hide boots 
and the red silk sashes had assembled themselves 
for the purpose of knocking the ball about. They 
smote with great solemnity up and down the 
grounds, while the little boys looked on. When 
they trotted, which was not seldom, they rose 
and sunk in their stirrups with a conscien- 
tiousness that cried out " Riding-school ! " from 
afar. 

Other young men in the park were riding after 
the English manner, in neatly cut riding-trousers 
and light saddles. Fate in derision had made each 
youth bedizen his animal with a checkered enam- 
elled leather brow-band visible half a mile away — 
a black-and-white checkered brow-band ! They 
can't do it, any more than an Englishman, by 
taking cold, can add that indescribable nasal twang 
to his orchestra. 

The other sight of the evening was a horror. 
The little tragedy played itself out at a neighboring 
table where two very young men and two very 



132 American Notes 

young women were sitting. It did not strike me 
till far into the evening that the pimply young 
reprobates were making the girls drunk. They 
gave them red wine and then white, and the voices 
rose slightly with the maidens' cheek flushes. I 
watched, wishing to stay, and the youths drank till 
their speech thickened and their eye-balls grew 
watery. It was sickening to see, because I knew 
what was going to happen. My friend eyed the 
group, and said : — 

" Maybe they 're children of respectable people. 
I hardly think, though, they'd be allowed out 
without any better escort than these boys. And yet 
the place is a place where every one comes, as you 
see. They may be Little Immoralities — in which 
case they would n't be so hopelessly overcome 
with two glasses of wine. They may be — " 

Whatever they were they got indubitably drunk 
— there in that lovely hall, surrounded by the best 
of Buffalo society. One could do nothing except 
invoke the judgment of Heaven on the two boys, 
themselves half sick with liquor. At the close 
of the performance the quieter maiden laughed 
vacantly and protested she could n't keep her feet. 
The four linked arms, and staggering, flickered 



Americans Defenceless Coasts 133 

out into the street — drunk, gentlemen and ladies, 
as Davy's swine, drunk as lords ! They dis- 
appeared down a side avenue, but I could hear 
their laughter long after they were out of sight. 

And they were all four children of sixteen and 
seventeen. Then, recanting previous opinions, I 
became a prohibitionist. Better it is that a man 
should go without his beer in public places, and 
content himself with swearing at the narrow- 
mindedness of the majority ; better it is to poison 
the inside with very vile temperance drinks, and to 
buy lager furtively at back-doors, than to bring 
temptation to the lips of young fools such as the 
four I had seen. I understand now why the 
preachers rage against drink. I have said : " There 
is no harm in it, taken moderately ; " and yet my 
own demand for beer helped directly to send those 
two girls reeling down the dark street to — God 
alone knows what end. 

If liquor is worth drinking, it is worth taking a 
little trouble to come at — such trouble as a man 
will undergo to compass his own desires. It is 
not good that we should let it lie before the eyes of 
children, and I have been a fool in writing to the 
contrary. Very sorry for myself, I sought a hotel, 



134 American Notes 

and found in the hall a reporter who wished to 
know what I thought of the country. Him I lured 
into conversation about his own profession, and 
from him gained much that confirmed me in my 
views of the grinding tyranny of that thing which 
they call the Press here. Thus : — 

I — But you talk about interviewing people 
whether they like it or not. Have you no bounds 
beyond which even your indecent curiosity must 
not go ? 

He — I have n*t struck 'em yet. What do you 
think of interviewing a widow two hours after her 
husband's death, to get her version of his life ? 

I — I think that is the work of a ghoul. Must 
the people have no privacy ? 

He — There is no domestic privacy in America. 
If there was, what the deuce would the papers do ? 
See here. Some time ago I had an assignment to 
write up the floral tributes when a prominent 
citizen had died. 

I — Translate, please ; I do not understand 
your pagan rites and ceremonies. 

He — I was ordered by the office to describe 
the flowers, and wreaths, and so on, that had been 
sent to a dead man's funeral. Well, I went to the 



America's Defenceless Coasts 135 

house. There was no one there to stop me, so I 
yanked the tinkler- — pulled the bell — and drifted 
into the room where the corpse lay all among the 
roses and smilax. I whipped out my note-book 
and pawed around among the floral tributes, turn- 
ing up the tickets on the wreaths and seeing who 
had sent them. In the middle of this I heard 
some one saying : " Please, oh, please ! " behind 
me, and there stood the daughter of the house, 
just bathed in tears — 

I — You unmitigated brute! 

He — Pretty much what I felt myself. " I 'm 
very sorry, miss," I said, " to intrude on the pri- 
vacy of your grief. Trust me, I shall make it as 
little painful as possible." 

I — But by what conceivable right did you 
outrage — 

He — Hold your horses. I 'm telling you. 
Well, she did n't want me in the house at all, and 
between her sobs fairly waved me away. I had 
half the tributes described, though, and the balance 
I did partly on the steps when the stiff 'un came 
out, and partly in the church. The preacher gave 
the sermon. That was n't my assignment. I 
skipped about among the floral tributes while he 



136 American Notes 

was talking. I could have made no excuse if I 
had gone back to the office and said that a pretty 
girl's sobs had stopped me obeying orders. I had 
to do it. What do you think of it all ? 

I (slowly) — Do you want to know ? 

He (with his note-book ready) — Of course. 
How do you regard it ? 

I — It makes me regard your interesting nation 
with the same shuddering curiosity that I should 
bestow on a Pappan cannibal chewing the scalp 
ofF his mother's skull. Does that convey any idea 
to your mind? It makes me regard the whole 
pack of you as heathens — real heathens — not the 
sort you send missions to — creatures of another 
flesh and blood. You ought to have been shot, 
not dead, but through the stomach, for your share 
in the scandalous business, and the thing you call 
your newspaper ought to have been sacked by the 
mob, and the managing proprietor hanged. 

He — From which, I suppose you have nothing 
of that kind in your country ? 

Oh ! '^ Pioneer," venerable " Pioneer," and 
you not less honest press of India, who are occa- 
sionally dull but never blackguardly, what could I 
say ? A mere " No," shouted never so loudly, 



America's Defenceless Coasts 137 

would not have met the needs of the case. I said 
no word. 

The reporter went away, and I took a train for 
Niagara Falls, which are twenty-two miles distant 
from this bad town, where girls get drunk of nights 
and reporters trample on corpses in the drawing- 
rooms of the brave and the free ! 



